Progress in Understanding How the Waggle Dance Improves the Foraging Efficiency of Honey Bee Colonies

Abstract

The waggle dance of the honey bee is one of the most extensively studied forms of animal communication, but only recently have investigators closely examined its adaptive significance, that is, how it improves the foraging efficiency of a honey bee colony. Studies at the colony level, in which investigators have compared the effectiveness of food collection between colonies with normal and disoriented dances, have found that the waggle dance improves a colony’s foraging performance when food sources are hard to find, variable in profitability, and ephemeral. Studies at the individual level, in which investigators compared the effectiveness of food collection between bees that do and do not use waggle dance information to find new food sources (recruits and scouts) have found that following a waggle dance to find a new food source raises the cost of doing so but that this cost is outweighed by a benefit in the quality of the food source that is found. The emerging picture of the adaptive significance of the honey bee’s waggle dance is that it makes it possible for a colony to function as a collective decision-making unit that is skilled at deciding how to distribute its forager workforce over an array of widely scattered, highly variable, and ever changing patches of flowers.