Too much noise on the dance floor

Abstract

Successful honey bee foragers communicate where they have found a good resource with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that encodes a distance and direction. Both of these components are repeated several times (1 to > 100) within the same dance. Additionally, both these components vary within a dance. Here we discuss some causes and consequences of intra-dance and inter-dance angular variation and advocate revisiting von Frisch and Lindauer’s earlier work to gain a better understanding of honey bee foraging ecology.

Keywords: :

• honey bee
• waggle dance
• animal communication
• signal noise
• foraging

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. PA00P3_139731 to R.S.) and The Nineveh Charitable Trust (to M.J.C.). Thanks to Professor Francis Ratnieks for his enthusiasm for the honey bee dance language.