Interesting journal article on sleep deprivation in bees. ((You did know bees sleep?) In fact they have light sleep and deep sleep, but do bees dream?
From the paper: Honey bees exhibit various criteria that define behavioral sleep (16), including an increased threshold of response to disturbance and a specific posture during easily reversed bouts of relative immobility (17). A sleep-specific behavior in honey bees is discontinuous ventilation, consisting of several pumping motions of the abdomen (metasoma), followed by an extended pause in ventilation (18-20). Discontinuous ventilation co-occurs with increased antennal immobility and other indicators of sleep (20) and thus can be used as a proxy for detecting sleeping honey bees both inside and outside comb cells (21) (Fig. 1 B and C). During periods of reduced antennal mobility, bees exhibit increased response thresholds, and total antennal immobility is suggestive of a deeper sleep state (16). We used relative immobility combined with discontinuous ventilation as our indicators of sleep, and these conditions combined with antenna immobility to identify periods of deep sleep.
Sleep deprivation impairs precision of waggle dance signaling in honey bees
by Barrett A. Klein , Arno Klein Margaret K. Wray , Ulrich G. Mueller , and Thomas D. Seeley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , Vol. 107, No. 52 (December 28, 2010), pp. 22705-22709
They used a magnetic device to wake up sleeping bees repeatedly all night long, and then studied how well they performed waggle dances the next day.
Abstract reads:
Sleep is essential for basic survival, and insufficient sleep leads to a variety of dysfunctions. In humans, one of the most profound consequences of sleep deprivation is imprecise or irrational communication, demonstrated by degradation in signaling as well as in receiving information. Communication in nonhuman animals may suffer analogous degradation of precision, perhaps with especially damaging consequences for social animals. However, society-specific consequences of sleep loss have rarely been explored, and no function of sleep has been ascribed to a truly social (eusocial) organism in the context of its society. Here we show that sleep-deprived honey bees {Apis mellifera) exhibit re duced precision when signaling direction information to food sources in their waggle dances. The deterioration of the honey bee's ability to communicate is expected to reduce the foraging efficiency of nestmates. This study demonstrates the impact of sleep deprivation on signaling in a eusocial animal. If the deterio ration of signals made by sleep-deprived honey bees and humans is generalizable, then imprecise communication may be one detri mental effect of sleep loss shared by social organisms.