Honey Bee Dance Language

The Dance Language

One of the most interesting aspects of honeybee behaviour is the way in which workers are able to communicate the location of food to their colleagues back at the hive. When foragers return to the hive having successfully found food they perform a kind of dance. Other bees, called dance attendees, observe this dance and are able to infer the location of the food. There are two kinds of dance. The round dance is used to communicate the location of nearby food whilst the waggle dance is used for more distant food. The waggle dance is also used to communicate the location of potential new nesting sites.

In the round dance the returning forager moves in clockwise circles one or more times. It then changes direction and moves counter-clockwise. It is not known how these movements encode the direction and distance to food.

During the waggle dance the bee moves in a roughly straight line whilst waggling from side to side with a frequency of about 13 times a second. The number of waggles indicates the distance to the food. After the bee has performed the correct number of waggles it will circle around to the right and repeat the movement. The direction of the dance, on the surface of the vertical honeycomb, indicates the direction of the food relative to the sun. Thus if a bee waggles whilst moving vertically straight up, this indicates that the food is to be found by flying directly towards the sun. If the sun is invisible then the direction is given as relative to where the sun should be. The position of the dance within the hive is also part of the message. The dances for further distances are performed deeper within the hive. There seems to be no message correlating to altitude.

The dances are not perfectly choreographed to communicate an exact distance and direction every time. Attendees, however, are able to average together many dances and create a reasonably accurate mental idea of the location. When bees are out foraging they don't fly in a straight line, a "beeline". Instead they steer slightly from side to side. It may be that the waggle dance corresponds to waggle flight. When a bee is dancing, the dance attendees will tend to follow her. Maybe following the dance is a kind of practice for the flight. The dance is only performed if the bee has successfully returned to the food source a number of times.

The dance language also has an acoustic component. As a bee waggles she also vibrates her wing muscles in short bursts. These vibrations produce a buzzing sound the timing of which correlates to the distance to the food. There is a second sound which is produced by dance attendees. An attendee makes a quarter-second buzzing noise to indicate that she wants to sample the food. On hearing this request the dancer will stop and share some of the food from her stomach. Having sampled the food the attendee is able to give feedback indicating what she thinks of the quality of the food. (??? How?). The forager considers this feedback when deciding whether or not to continue dancing.

When food is flown to indirectly, because of a barrier to go around for example, the dance will indicate the true direction as the crow flies. It is not known how the bee calculates true direction from the combination of different journey legs. It seems, however, that bees have a mental map of where food is to be found. Of course humans are capable of building a mental map, and there is evidence from maze experiments that rats are capable of this too. It is amazing, however, that bees, with such a limited brain capacity, are also able to construct these mental maps.

Another intelligent aspect of the dance behaviour is the fact that the foragers can take into account the constantly changing angle between the sun and the food. If the forager dances for an extended period of time, the direction of the waggle run precesses at a speed correlating to the speed of the sun. The dance is never performed at noon. This is thought to be because the sun moves more rapidly at noon and thus makes it harder to navigate. Bees also stop dancing when a storm is approaching. This is particularly true for dances for more distant food sources.