# Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Adjacent Honey Bee Colonies Locally Partition Their Foraging Across Landscapes

## TL;DR

Honey bee colonies partition their foraging at the local level to avoid competition, while collectively using resources across the landscape.

## Contribution

Quantifies spatial foraging patterns of colocalized honey bee colonies using waggle dance data to test optimal foraging theory.

## Key findings

- Dances from the same colony did not cluster more closely than those from different colonies.
- K-means clustering showed dances from the same colony often formed distinct local clusters.
- Foraging partitioning at the local level reduces intercolony competition while maintaining landscape-wide resource use.

## Abstract

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) predicts that animals employ foraging strategies that maximize a particular currency, such as net energetic efficiency, to meet their nutritional demands. Two nonexclusive patterns that arise from OFT are convergence on high‐quality resources and resource partitioning. Honey bees make collective decisions by integrating their individual foraging with social recruitment behaviors: returning foragers communicate the approximate vector to high‐quality resources using waggle dances. Because we can eavesdrop on their communications, waggle dance decoding is a valuable tool for exploring OFT predictions as it allows us to map how honey bees use landscapes. In this study, we analyzed 8049 dances from colocalized colonies across three landscapes to investigate whether neighboring colonies forage by not partitioning patches (i.e., converging their food collection on the same patches), by partitioning at the landscape level, or by partitioning at the local level. To differentiate between these three possible scenarios, we examined three metrics: (1) interdance distances between and within colonies; (2) k‐nearest neighbors; and (3) k‐means clustering. We observed no difference in the distances between dances performed by bees from the same colony compared to those from different colonies. Also, we found at each of the three field sites that dances from the same colony were not more likely to appear as close neighbors to each other. Finally, k‐means cluster analysis demonstrates that dance locations advertised by the same colony aggregated nonrandomly in the three sites, where dances from the same colony comprised a significant majority of dances within k‐means clusters and 62% of clusters consisted entirely of dances from a single colony. Together, these results support a foraging scenario where honey bees partition their foraging, but at the local level. This strategy may help limit intercolony foraging competition.

In this article, we explore optimal foraging theory predictions for competing honey bee colonies by quantifying the relative spatial foraging patterns of 8049 waggle dances from colocalized colonies across three landscapes. Our results demonstrate that neighboring colonies distribute their foraging widely at the landscape scale, while partitioning resources at the local scale. These findings suggest that honey bees employ a foraging strategy that simultaneously exploits available resources and limits inter‐colony competition.