Every honey dance

TL:DR – The waggle dance of the honeybee carries more information than scientists previously thought, allowing the bees to find known food sources even if they start their journey from a place other than the hive.

Here’s the buzz…

Scientists and beekeepers have known for years that honeybees have a way of communicating the location of food sources that involves hitting the dancefloor in the hive. The dance that the bees use to communicate is called the waggle dance, and the moves tell other bees where to find food, specifically nectar and pollen-rich flowers. The dance conveys both the distance and direction of the food source, allowing other bees to follow the instructions and find the food.

Now, Charles Gallistel of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA and Randolf Menzel of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues have studied a hive of nearly 2,000 honeybees in Germany. They watched as foragers (always female bees) returned to the hive and recruited other bees to the food source using the waggle dance. But then, they did an interesting experiment. They captured the recruited bees and released them far away from the hive. They tracked the bees’ location using radar and watched to see what they would do.

Even though the bees were released a long way from their home hive, they still flew in the direction indicated by the waggle dance. Moreover, the bees didn’t fly in a straight line, instead, they flew in a direction that was biased towards the true location of the food source. This suggests that the bees were able to use the information in the waggle dance to create a “cognitive map” of the food source’s location. This means they could presumably find the food source from any starting point going from A to Zzzzzz.

This new work published in PNAS suggests that the information contained in the honeybee waggle dance is even richer than was previously thought. This could have important implications for our understanding of how bees navigate and find food, which could have implications for everything from agriculture to conservation.