Honey bees possess one of the most complex and remarkable behaviors to be discovered in kingdom animalia: the waggle dance. This dance is a unique form of nest-based communication that successful foragers use to tell their nestmates the exact location of a food source or a suitable new nest site. Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for recognizing how this complex communication system works.

What makes the waggle dance language so remarkable is its use of the sun and gravity as reference points for symbolic communication. This system allows the honey bee colony to work together as a highly efficient unit, directing one another to rich food sources – even those located miles from the hive.

Distance and Direction of the Waggle Dance

After returning to the honey bee hive, a successful forager performs the dance to communicate to its fellow honey bees the vector direction and distance. The event happens on the vertical surface of the honeycomb and gives other honey bees the exact external coordinates via internal moves.

• Direction: The direction to the food source is conveyed by the angle of the straight waggle run relative to gravity (straight up). If the honey bee runs straight up, the food is in the direction of the sun. If she runs 30 degrees to the right of vertical, the food is 30 degrees to the right of the sun’s current position.
• Distance: The distance to the resource is communicated by the duration of the waggle run. A longer waggle run tells the recruits that they have to fly farther to reach the destination.

By decoding many waggle dances, researchers can create a map of where the colony is foraging, essentially using the honey bees as natural bioindicators to monitor the floral abundance and “health” of a landscape over large areas. Because foragers only dance for the most profitable resources, these waggle dances provide spatial information about the best forage available at any given time.

While the mechanics of the dance are consistent, research shows there is a surprising element of individuality – each honey bee has its own “style” that can actually enhance communication success.

The Power of Diversity

It’s a common assumption that a perfect, highly accurate waggle dance would lead to the most unique insights. However, studies utilizing tagged honey bees, video cameras and artificial food sources have revealed a counterintuitive pattern:

• Longer Runs Were More Successful: Researchers found that waggle dances that had a slightly longer run – effectively telling the recruits to overshoot the food source – were often more successful than dances that described the most accurate distance.
• The Second Chance: The leading theory is that this slight “overshooting” may give the recruited foragers a second chance to find the food source as they search on the way back to the honey bee hive, ultimately increasing their chance of success.
• Individuality Is Key: This highlights that diversity in communication styles enhances recruitment success. If every honey bee communicated exactly the same information, the likelihood of recruits finding the food would actually decrease. This observation adds communication effectiveness to the list of known benefits of honey bee individuality, alongside superior thermoregulation, growth and disease resistance.

The Value of the Waggle Dance
The ability to decode the waggle dance is a powerful tool for ecology and conservation, providing data that would be impossible to gather through conventional field surveying.

Surveying Landscape Health
Because a forager’s decision to dance integrates all relevant costs – flight distance, competition and nectar profitability – the communicated distance is a proxy for forage availability. The farther a dancer indicates, the relatively less available the forage is nearby.

• Distance Data: Examining the average waggle dance duration per month can indicate when forage is relatively scarce or abundant or how availability varies across urban, suburban and rural settings.
• Targeting Resources: This methodology can help land managers and government agencies understand when and where supplementary forage would be most beneficial, allowing for fine-tuning of conservation policies, such as determining the efficacy of stewardship schemes that encourage flower-rich habitats.

Environmental Risk Assessment

The waggle dance also provides unique insights into how honey bees are exposed to environmental risks. By decoding waggle dances, researchers can better understand the dynamics of a honey bee colony’s foraging of certain crops that may be a source of contaminants, helping in environmental risk assessment for substances like neonicotinoid insecticides.

In essence, the waggle dance transforms the honey bee into a highly sophisticated, tiny biosensor. Our job as researchers and stewards is simply to listen to the valuable information they are so expertly communicating.

New Data and Insights
Recent research continues to generate exciting discoveries about the honey bee’s complex communication systems:

• Basic Biology Gains: Studies involving the waggle dance are generating significant gains in behavioral ecology and neuroscience, including understanding the waggle dance stop signal (a negative feedback loop when a resource becomes dangerous), the role of gravity in dance precision and how the honey bee brain processes reward information.
• Evolutionary Context: The “dance language” is believed to be quite ancient, with genetic and fossil studies suggesting it could have evolved as early as the divergence of extant honey bee species around 20 million years ago in a sub-tropical to temperate climate with patchy vegetation. This complex communication system evolved in an environment where resources were hard to find and varied significantly in quality.

Learning all the ways honey bees expertly gather and thrive never ceases to amaze us at Nate’s Hives. We are honored to work alongside these industrious pollinators and thankful for the honey they provide. What other secrets could the honey bee waggle dance hold?