Waggle dance
By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.
[5] Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.
Therefore, bees that follow the waggle run of the dance are still correctly led to the food source even though its angle relative to the sun has changed.
[11] Kevin Abbott and Reuven Dukas of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada discovered that if a dead western honeybee is placed on a flower, bees performed far fewer waggle dances upon returning to the hive.
[12][13] Though first decoded by Karl von Frisch, dancing behavior in bees had been observed and described multiple times prior.
Around 100 years before Frisch's discovery, Nicholas Unhoch described dancing behavior of bees as being an indulgence "in certain pleasures and jollity".
[14] Jürgen Tautz also writes about it in his book The Buzz about Bees (2008): Many elements of the communication used to recruit miniswarms to feeding sites are also observed in "true" swarming behavior.
Therefore, it has been suggested that electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees stimulate mechanoreceptors and may play a role in social communication during the waggle dance.
[16] As defined by von Frisch, Tanzsprache (German for 'dance language') is the information about direction, distance, and quality of a resource (such as food or nesting sites) contained within the waggle dance.
[17] In an experiment on the honeybee Apis mellifera, most individuals who thoroughly followed a waggle dance ignored the resource direction and location information.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a system of language where a sign is made up of two chief components.
[4] Likewise, studies have found that honeybees rarely make use of the information communicated in the waggle dance and seem to only do so about ten percent of the time.
[21] This sheds light on the fact that following social information is more energetically costly than foraging independently and is not always advantageous.
[25] Depending on weather, other competitors, and food source characteristics, transmitted information may quickly degrade and become obsolete.
[26] As a result, foragers have been reported to be attached to their food sites and continue to revisit a single patch many times after it has become unprofitable.
In the tropics, food resources can come in the form of flowering trees which are rich in nectar but are scattered sparsely and bloom only briefly.
Using the vibration of their wings, these bees use acoustics to aid in the signaling and provide more information about the distance, direction, and quality of the food/nesting site.
[33] In line with recent work in swarm intelligence research involving optimization algorithms inspired by the behavior of social insects (including bees, ants and termites), and vertebrates such as fish and birds, there has recently been research on using bee waggle dance behavior for efficient fault-tolerant routing.
[34] From the abstract of Wedde, Farooq, and Zhang (2004):[35] In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm, BeeHive, which has been inspired by the communicative and evaluative methods and procedures of honey bees.
