Abstract
It is known that the honey bee waggle dance communicates the distance and direction of some item of interest, most commonly a food source, to nestmates. Previous work suggests that, in order to successfully acquire the information contained in a dance, other honey bees must follow the dancer from behind. We revisit this topic using updated methodology, including a greater distance from the hive to the feeder, which produced longer, more easily-read dances. Our results are not congruent with those of earlier work, and we did not conclude that honey bees must follow a dancer from behind in order to obtain the dance information. Rather, it is more likely that a follower can successfully acquire a dance’s information regardless of where she may be located about a dancer.
Highlights
The honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) waggle dance has been a topic of great interest to biologists for over 50 years, and it has been well researched during that time, certain aspects related to it remain contested
The number of waggle runs followed from the rear position was significantly different from the number of runs followed from the front position (P value
The number of waggle runs followed from the front was significantly different from the number of dances followed from the side (P value=3.86x10−12)
Summary
The honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) waggle dance has been a topic of great interest to biologists for over 50 years, and it has been well researched during that time, certain aspects related to it remain contested. The information encoded in the waggle phase communicates the distance and direction of some item of interest, most commonly a food source, to other bees within the hive [2, 3]. When a returning forager performs the waggle dance to alert her nestmates to the existence of a useable food source, other bees crowd around her, touching her with their antennae [4] and at times following her movements through portions of the dance. Judd [6] examined whether there were specific locations relative to the dancer that a follower must occupy in order to successfully receive the information from the dance. He concluded that bees must follow from the rear of a dancer for information transfer to occur
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