Too much noise on the dance floor

Abstract

S uccessful honey bee foragers communicate where they have found a good resource with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that encodes a distance and direction. Both of these components are repeated several times (1 to > 100) within the same dance. Additionally, both these components vary within a dance. Here we discuss some causes and consequences of intra-dance and interdance angular variation and advocate revisiting von Frisch and Lindauer’s earlier work to gain a better understanding of honey bee foraging ecology.