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Abstract:
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Sleep is a behavioral condition fraught with mystery . Its definition—either a suite
of diagnostic behavioral characters , electrophysiological signatures , or a combination of
the two—varies in the literature and lacks an over -arching purpose . In spite of these vagaries , sleep supports a large and dynamic research community studying the
mechanisms , ontogeny , possible functions and , to a lesser degree , its evolution across vertebrates and in a small number of invertebrates . Sleep has been described and examined in many social organisms , including eusocial honey bees (Apis mellifera ) , but the role of sleep within societies has rarely been addressed in non -human animals . I
investigated uniquely social aspects of sleep within honey bees by asking basic questions
relating to who sleeps , when and where individuals sleep , the flexibility of sleep , and why sleep is important within colonies of insects . First , I investigated caste -dependent sleep patterns in honey bees and report that younger workers (cell cleaners and nurse bees ) exhibit arrhythmic and brief sleep bouts primarily while inside comb cells , while older workers (food storers and foragers ) display periodic , longer sleep bouts primarily outside of cells . Next , I mapped sleep using remote thermal sensing across colonies of
honey bees after introducing newly eclosed workers to experimental colonies and following them through periods of their adult lives . Bees tended to sleep outside of cells closer to the edge of the hive than when asleep inside cells or awake , and exhibited caste -dependent thermal patterns , both temporally and spatially . Wishing to test the flexibility of sleep , I trained foragers to a feeder and made a food resource available early in the morning or late in the afternoon . The bees were forced to shift their foraging schedule ,
which consequently also shifted their sleep schedule . Finally , I sleep -deprived a subset of foragers within a colony by employing a magnetic “insominator” to test for changes in their signaling precision . Sleep -deprived foragers exhibited reduced precision when encoding direction information to food sources in their waggle dances . These studies reveal patterns and one possible purpose of sleep in the context of a society . |