Honey bee transmissions, as it turns out, have echoing agricultural, environmental, and economic ramifications. The USDA estimates that one out of every three bites of food in the United States depends on honey bees and other pollinators. In monetary terms, insect pollinators support crop yields and agricultural ecosystems and are believed to contribute an estimated $24 billion to the U.S. economy annually.

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences team’s work is part of a larger grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a nonprofit established through bipartisan congressional support in the 2014 Farm Bill. Couvillon and Schürch, along with fellow Department of Entomology assistant professor Sally Taylor and Megan O’Rourke, an assistant professor with the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, are examining pollinator behavior in different landscapes to determine where and when planting supplemental forage could have the most positive impact on pollinator nutrition and health.

Nearly six decades ago, Karl von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning ethologist, discovered that the angle of the dancer's body relative to the vertical encodes the direction of the forage, and the distance to the food source is communicated by the duration of the bee’s dance.

During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs.

Because of the challenge and cost of creating an original duration-to-distance calibration, von Frisch’s calibration model, which is based on averages rather than data on individual bees, has served as the gold standard in the bee research community.

Yet, according to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees conveying the same location can vary their waggle runs, and even individual bees repeating a run may alter their dance. Moreover, bees are inspired to dance only when they have located particularly tantalizing food resources. Anomalies such as these, coupled with a greater understanding of bees’ highly developed cognition, inspired the husband-and-wife duo to develop their own distance-duration calibration system six years ago with bees that were predominantly A. mellifera mellifera in Sussex, United Kingdom.

“We have collected this information from many bees in two different landscapes separated by an ocean and several years,” said Couvillon. “However, there is still a lot we don’t know about what the bees are feeding on. So, imagine decoding many dances and plotting them on a map to see where the bees are going. We wanted to do this by season to provide a comprehensive look at what they are foraging and where. This way, we can also see when it’s harder for them to find forage and when it’s easier.”