SAN DIEGO—The size of a honey bee colony will impact how the colony makes potentially risky life-or-death decisions in the face of changing conditions, according to findings published Nov. 10 by researchers from the University of California–San Diego’s (UCSD) Division of Biological Sciences and Institute for Neural Computation. Working at a UCSD apiary, the researchers—including one from the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences in Germany—collected data over several years on the behaviors of individuals in small and large honey bee colonies. Efforts focused on communication, namely a vigorous “waggle dance” honey bees perform to let their hive mates know about an available food source beneficial to the colony. According to the research, when conditions of such food sources deteriorate, or when a fellow hive mate is threatened by a predator, bees then produce “stop” signals—which include transmitting vibrations and delivering headbutts—that let waggle dancers know that the source is no longer a viable option. The study, published in Wednesday’s ‘Journal …