ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attempts to quantify the relative assessments of caloric costs and gains made by honeybees by studying the bees' communication round dance. He manipulates the magnitude of costs and gains for bees to forage and then quantify the bees' assessments of the parameters by quantifying the round dance. An important assumption in models of optimal diets is that animals can perceive energetic costs and gains while foraging among various food items and explicit assumptions are made as to how the information is processed and what decisions result. Honeybees were housed in a one-frame, glass-sided observation hive. A trial consisted of a bee foraging between the flowers until it returned to the observation hive, the total time the bee foraged during the trial was determined using a stopwatch and the number of floral visits was counted.
