Honey Bee Dances Don’t Just Give Directions—They Recruit an Audience Too
- 演化之聲
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Honey bees are insects that collect nectar from flowers. They bring the nectar back to the hive, where it undergoes a series of processes and is ultimately converted into honey—a sweet food widely enjoyed by humans. Honey bees typically form large colonies, living together within a hive. Within the colony, different individuals perform different tasks, and naturally, a group of bees is responsible for nectar foraging.
This raises an interesting question: flowers are not evenly distributed, and some areas contain far more blossoms than others. If a bee encounters a rich patch of flowers while foraging, how can it communicate the precise location of that patch to its nestmates, given that bees cannot speak?
The answer is remarkable: bees communicate through dance. The direction of the dance encodes information about the location of the flower patch, while the distance is represented by the duration of a single dance segment. Specifically, the dance follows a figure-eight pattern. During the central “waggle run,” the bee moves forward while shaking its abdomen; at the end of this segment, it loops back around to begin the next cycle. The duration of the waggle run indicates distance—the longer the waggle, the farther the food source.
The discovery of the waggle dance has revealed the complexity of honey bee social organization. But what if this dance contains even more hidden layers? A recent study suggests that the precision of a bee’s dance may vary depending on the number of audience members observing it.
To investigate how audience size affects the waggle dance, researchers designed two main experiments. In the first, they simply reduced the number of bees in the hive and observed changes in the dancer bees’ behavior. In the second, they replaced experienced follower bees—those that typically attend and follow the dance—with newly emerged, inexperienced bees. This allowed the researchers to examine whether dancer bees respond differently to audiences with varying levels of experience.
The researchers then trained approximately 30 bees in each colony to visit a feeder containing sucrose solution that mimicked nectar. After the training period, they began observing the waggle dances of these foragers.
The results showed that bees do indeed alter their dancing behavior when the number of audience members decreases. Furthermore, the second experiment demonstrated that what dancer bees require are experienced followers capable of interpreting and tracking the dance, rather than inexperienced young bees. In other words, even if the total number of bees in the hive remains constant, changes in the age structure of the colony can influence the dancer’s behavior.
When the number of audience members decreases, the total number of dance circuits performed by the dancer bee also declines. In addition, the precision of both distance and directional information becomes significantly reduced. These findings reveal a more complex level of social interaction among individuals within the honey bee colony.
Why does a smaller audience lead to reduced dance precision? The study suggests that this is not due to laziness or energy conservation. Instead, dancer bees appear to actively search for additional audience members. This behavior indirectly lengthens the return path after each waggle run, allowing the dancer to cover a larger area and repeatedly initiate the dance from different positions. As a result, variations are introduced into the duration, distance, and angle of the waggle dance. Considering that the interior of a hive is not perfectly even, expanding the dancing area likely makes it more difficult for bees to maintain consistent posture and footing in each cycle. This ultimately leads to reduced precision when audience members are scarce.
Finally, this study may also provide an answer to a long-standing question: why do bees loop back in a circular path instead of dancing continuously in a straight line? In theory, returning via loops should introduce more directional error, and a straight-line dance might seem more efficient.
The results of this study offer a new explanation: the looping return is an essential part of the dancer’s effort to recruit an audience. During this phase, the bee attracts more followers, suggesting that the waggle dance is not solely about transmitting precise information. It also serves to recruit new observers. These two functions—information accuracy and audience recruitment—must be balanced in order for the dance to achieve its maximum effectiveness.
（Author: Bai Leng）
Reference：
Lin, T., Dong, S., Gu, G., Tan K. (2026). The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance. PNAS.
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