Abstract
A honeybee's waggle dance is an intriguing example of multisensory convergence, central processing and symbolic information transfer. It conveys to bees and human observers the position of a relatively small area at the endpoint of an average vector in a two-dimensional system of coordinates. This vector is often computed from a collection of waggle phases from the same or different dancers. The question remains, however, of how informative a small sample of waggle phases can be to the bees, and how the spatial information encoded in the dance is actually mapped to the followers' searches in the field. Certainly, it is the variability of a dancer's performance that initially defines the level of uncertainty that followers must cope with if they were to successfully decode information in the dance. Understanding how a dancer's behaviour is mapped to that of its followers initially relies on the analysis of both the accuracy and precision with which the dancer encodes spatial information in the dance. Here we describe within-individual variations in the encoding of the distance to and direction of a goal. We show that variations in the number of a dancer's wagging movements, a measure that correlates well with the distance to the goal, do not depend upon the dancer's travelled distance, meaning that there is a constant variance of wagging movements around the mean. We also show that the duration of the waggle phases and the angular dispersion and divergence of successive waggle phases co-vary with a dancer's orientation in space. Finally, using data from dances recorded through high-speed video techniques, we present the first analysis of the accuracy and precision with which an increasing number of waggle phases conveys spatial information to a human observer.
Highlights
Karl von Frisch (von Frisch, 1946) discovered that a highly stereotyped, still variable motion pattern that honeybees perform on the comb surface conveys to bees and human observers the circular coordinates of relatively well-defined locations
Compelling evidence indicates that the waggle dance is at the core of a series of communication systems enabling a honeybee colony to coordinate the activity of its members during foraging and nest-site selection (e.g. Lindauer, 1961; Seeley, 1995; Dyer, 2002; Sherman and Visscher, 2002)
Within-individual variations in the encoding of distance information For each of the three different distances of the first series, we quantified the duration of the single waggle phases and the number and duration of the single wagging movements of a dancer’s body
Summary
Karl von Frisch (von Frisch, 1946) discovered that a highly stereotyped, still variable motion pattern that honeybees perform on the comb surface conveys to bees and human observers the circular coordinates of relatively well-defined locations. Lindauer, 1961; Seeley, 1995; Dyer, 2002; Sherman and Visscher, 2002) This is possible because those colony members that keep close contact with a dancing bee, usually called dance followers, appear to detect a variety of signals emitted by the dancer, and process them in such a way that their ensuing behaviours may greatly depend upon the content of these signals (von Frisch, 1967). It moves on along a rather semicircular trajectory, and returns to a position close to the starting point of the recent waggle phase; this portion is called a ‘return phase’, and tends to be alternatively performed clockwise and counter-clockwise along the dance Once at this position, the dancing bee repeats the forward, wagging portion of the dance. The number of waggle phases can vary significantly across dances, thereby revealing regulatory responses and amplification phenomena on the signal production side of the communication process (e.g. Seeley, 1986; De Marco et al, 2005)
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