Bee dancing is better with the right audience
Precision of the food-directional ‘waggle dance’ fluctuates with audience size and who’s in attendance
image:
A dancing honey bee (center) is surrounded by an audience of “followers” that carefully interpret the movements of the ultra-fast ‘waggle’ dance.
view moreCredit: Heather Broccard Bell
Dance like nobody’s watching? Not quite, at least not for honey bees.
In recent years, scientists have carefully deciphered details of the honey bee “waggle dance,” which is an advanced form of social communication in the animal kingdom. University of California San Diego biologists and their international colleagues recently unraveled how the dance conveys critical information about food sources for the benefit of fellow hive inhabitants.
A new study on the dynamics of the dance, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that it’s not just the dance performer that matters — it’s also who’s in the audience. The experiments showed that the performing forager is not simply broadcasting a predetermined message. Rather, the precision of the performer’s directions to the food source depends on its audience.
Once a foraging bee returns to the hive after discovering a promising food source, it communicates this vital location information to hive mates by performing a blazing-fast, complex dance. While nestmates pay attention, the dancing forager runs forward while “waggling” its abdomen, then loops back and repeats the performance in a matter of seconds. The angle of the waggle dance conveys the direction of the food relative to the sun, and the duration of the performance encodes the distance to the source.
Professor James Nieh of the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences likens the new findings to a street performance. With a good-sized audience, street musicians focus on the performance itself. But when the crowd thins, the performer scans faces, shifts position and puts more effort into finding and keeping an audience. The search for a receptive audience essentially changes the bee's performance because it is difficult to maintain the precision of a fast, repeated movement pattern while simultaneously moving around to locate and engage an audience.
“Everyone has seen a street musician or a performer adjust to a changing crowd,” said Nieh, a faculty member in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. “In the hive, we see a comparable tradeoff. When fewer bees follow, dancers move more as they search for their audience, and the dance becomes less precise.”
Working with scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Queen Mary University of London, Nieh studied experimental hives and monitored the honey bee “dance floor,” which replicated the crowded, dynamic social space found in real hives. In the first part of the experiment, they evaluated fluctuating numbers of bees in the primary dancing area to test the changes caused by different audience sizes. In a second set of experiments, they held the number of bees constant, but changed the age of the audience members by introducing young worker bees, which are not interested in following dances. In both experimental scenarios, dancers were less precise when performing for a smaller audience.
“The waggle dance is often presented as a one-way information transfer,” said Ken Tan, the senior author of the study and a researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Our data show that feedback from the audience shapes the signal itself. In that sense, the dancer is not only sending information, but also responding to social conditions on the dance floor.”
The new study also provided clues to how dancers sense audience size and composition. Audience members, they found, make frequent antennal and body contact with dancers. Such tactile cues likely provide information about audience composition.
Lars Chittka, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, said the study shows that “humans aren’t the only ones who perform differently depending on their audience. Our study shows that honey bees quite literally dance better when they know someone is watching. When followers are scarce, dancers wander around searching for listeners — and in doing so, their signals become fuzzier. It’s a lovely reminder that even in the miniature world of insects, communication is a deeply social affair.”
Apart from honey bees, the new research results offer a window into how animal groups manage information. Collective groups of animals often depend on signals that must be repeated, shared and acted upon.
“The new findings show that the accuracy of a signal can depend on the availability of receivers, not only on the motivation of the sender,” said Nieh. “That kind of feedback may be important in animal societies, engineered swarms and other distributed systems where the quality of information can rise or fall with audience dynamics.”
The study’s researchers include: Tao Lin, Shihao Dong, Gaoying Gu, Fu Zhang, Xiuchuan Ye, Tianyi Wang, Ziqi Wang, Jianjun Li, James C. Nieh, Lars Chittka and Ken Tan.
Funding for the study was provided by the 14th Five-Year Plan of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden; Chinese Academy of Sciences (E3ZKFF3B); the Yunnan Revitalization Talents Support Plan (XDYC-QNRC-2023-0566); and National Natural Science Foundation of China (32571753 and 32322051).
When honey bee foragers locate a food source, such as this lemonade berry sumac shrub (Rhus integrifolia), they return to the hive and communicate the source through the intricate details of the waggle dance. Credit: Heather Broccard Bell
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance
Article Publication Date
23-Mar-2026
Bumblebees Are Hosts For Dangerous Bee Virus
Wild bumblebees serve as key hosts for acute bee paralysis virus. While the virus appears to cause little harm to bumblebees, infection is usually fatal to honeybees. Until now, it was assumed that honeybees were the key host for the virus. By using data from extensive field trials, a team from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Georg August University of Göttingen has now identified the red-tailed bumblebee as the key host for acute bee paralysis virus. Their study was published in the journal “Ecology Letters” and could help inform policies that aim at curbing the spread of such diseases in nature.
Honeybees, wild bees and other insect species are connected by their shared visits to flowers. “A flowering summer meadow is therefore both a source of food and a potential site for the transmission of viral infections. This is because insects searching for food there come into contact with material that may be contaminated with viruses, such as pollen and nectar,” says biologist Professor Robert Paxton from MLU. Until now, research has assumed that honeybees serve as primary hosts for various viruses and can thus infect bumblebees and other wild bees. However, the new study paints a different picture: according to it, wild bees can also be reservoir hosts for viruses and thus theoretically contribute to the infection of honeybees.
This result is based on field data collected by the team at 32 locations in Lower Saxony and Hesse. The researchers first observed whether different bee species visit the same flower species. They also used virus screening of 1,725 insects comprising multiple bee species to analyse how much each bee species contributes to the spread of various viruses. “To identify the bee species that contribute the most to the spread of viruses, we used the basic reproduction number, R?. This measure estimates how widely a virus can spread from one insect to others of the same species,” explains Patrycja Pluta from MLU, lead author of the study. The team calculated precisely for each combination of virus and bee species how easily a virus can spread and how much each bee species potentially contributes to the spread of viruses.
The researchers identified the most important host insects for three known bee viruses. They found that honeybees are the main carriers of deformed wing virus (DWV) and black queen cell virus (BQCV) at the sites studied. „However, the main host insect for the acute bee paralysis virus is a wild bee: the red-tailed bumblebee Bombus lapidarius,” says Patrycja Pluta. When honeybees become infected with the virus, they are unable to fly after a short time, start to tremble and die within a few days. This can lead to the rapid collapse of an entire colony.
Another finding: the composition of bee species at a location has less influence on the spread of viruses than previously assumed. In contrast, direct contact with bees that transmit many viruses plays a decisive role. And this occurs when visiting flowers. According to Robert Paxton, these findings are important for understanding how diseases spread in nature and how they can possibly be counteracted. „The more space and the more diverse food bees have, the less likely infections are to occur. To minimise the risk of further spread of disease, more flower strips with many different plant species would be very helpful, for example,“ says Paxton.
No comments:
Post a Comment