US EditionPrecision of the food-directional 'waggle dance' fluctuates with audience size and who's in attendance, study reveals
Researchers found honeybee waggle dance precision changes with audience feedback and individual styles, improving recruitment success through unique communication patterns.
- New research shows Professor Ken Tan's team found waggle-dance precision varies with audience size and composition.
- Using clear-walled hives, video cameras, and tagging, the Couvillon Lab, including former Ph.D. student Laura McHenry, studied waggle-dance miscommunication, Couvillon said, 'Now we have also seen that diverse communication enhances recruitment success'.
- Researchers observed that individual bees exhibit consistent, unique dance 'styles' and that overshooting dances with longer runs defied the original hypothesis by improving recruitment.
- Observers note the findings could inform engineered swarms and distributed systems, as Couvillon said, 'Now we have also seen that diverse communication enhances recruitment success', despite many recruits still failing to find food.
- The study, recently published in Current Biology, recasts the waggle as diverse communication, overturning expectations and offering principles for models of animal societies and engineered swarms.
18 Articles
18 Articles
Honey Bees Dance Better When Someone Is Watching
Honey bees literally dance better when they have an audience. Honey bees don’t deliver perfect directions unless someone’s watching closely. When their audience shrinks, their famous waggle dance gets less accurate as they try to draw attention. “Dance like nobody’s watching” may be good advice for humans, but honey bees operate very differently. Over the [...]
Precision of the food-directional 'waggle dance' fluctuates with audience size and who's in attendance, study reveals
In recent years, scientists have carefully deciphered details of the honey bee "waggle dance," which is an advanced form of social communication in the animal kingdom. University of California San Diego biologists and their international colleagues recently unraveled how the dance conveys critical information about food sources for the benefit of fellow hive inhabitants.
Honeybee dance 'styles' sway food foraging success
Biologists have learned several interesting patterns related to bee communication. One such observation was that bees have consistent, unique ways of dancing, meaning each bee has its own 'style' that it adds to the communication. Could the success of the waggle dance be related to this uniqueness? Would bees that communicated similarly yield more successful recruits? Or is there some other factor at play? This study reveals the waggle to be a d…
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