When it comes to animal communication, honey bees may have one of the most interesting forms yet. When a honey bee returns to the hive with knowledge of a premier food source, it will perform what is known as a “waggle dance” — a series of wiggling and looping motions that gives fellow hive members a detailed map to where the food sources may be.
While science has known about the waggle dance, emerging research reveals that the dance is just one part of communicating food sources; the other is which bees are in the audience.
These new findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examine why the audience is just as important as the waggle dance in communicating about food sources.
How Honey Bees Play to a Crowd
To us, a waggle dance may just look like a bee walking in circles, shaking her abdomen. However, her fellow hive mates can tell the direction of a food source as relative to the sun based on the angle of the waggle dance, while the duration conveys how far away the food source is.
James Nieh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego School of Biological Sciences, and one of the study’s authors, compares the waggle dance to that of a street performer. If a street performer is playing to a larger audience, the performer will focus more on their performance; however, if the audience is smaller, the performer will put more stock in holding on to the audience members rather than on their performance.
Explore All OptionsWhen a bee returns to the hive and finds that there is a small audience to show its dance off to, the bee may be spending more time worrying about the audience, rather than focusing on its waggle dance performance.
“Everyone has seen a street musician or a performer adjust to a changing crowd,” said Nieh, in a press release. “In the hive, we see a comparable tradeoff. When fewer bees follow, dancers move more as they search for their audience, and the dance becomes less precise.”
Read More: Bumblebee Queens Can Survive and Breathe Underwater For Over a Week By Cutting Energy Demands
Comparing the Honey Bee Audience by Size and Age
For this study, Nieh, along with researchers from Queen Mary University in London and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, observed experimental hives and studied the honey bee ‘dance floor.’ According to the study, the dance floor replicated the busy and crowded dynamics of the social space within traditional hives.
For part one of the experiment, the research team analyzed fluctuations in the number of bees in the dance area to test how changes in bee numbers affected the dance. In the second part of the experiment, the team kept the audience size the same but introduced younger worker bees, who were less interested in waggle dances, thereby lowering the audience's average age.
From the results, the team found that in both parts of the experiment, the waggle dance became less precise as the number of audience members decreased.
“The waggle dance is often presented as a one-way information transfer,” said Ken Tan, the senior author of the study and a researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the press release. “Our data show that feedback from the audience shapes the signal itself. In that sense, the dancer is not only sending information, but also responding to social conditions on the dance floor.”
Communication Through Dance and Touch
Another thing the team believes they found during their study is how honey bees determine the size of their audience. The team noted that during the dance, the audience bees frequently contact the dancing bee's body and antenna. This method could provide the dancer with information about the audience.
The study results provide further insight into how animal groups communicate and manage information. In collective groups like bee hives, communication can depend on repeating and sharing signals.
“The new findings show that the accuracy of a signal can depend on the availability of receivers, not only on the motivation of the sender,” said Nieh. “That kind of feedback may be important in animal societies, engineered swarms, and other distributed systems where the quality of information can rise or fall with audience dynamics.”
Read More: Bumblebees and Ants Battle in Violent Nectar Wars, Leading to Death and Food Shortage
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from the recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance
