Honeybees in search of food have to feel their way towards it. High-speed video footage has shown that foraging bees use their sense of touch to decode the famous waggle dance.
The waggle dance that honeybees use to communicate the location of nearby food sources was discovered more than 60 years ago. The waggle is performed in a straight line as the dancer runs up a honeycomb in its hive. This line鈥檚 angle relative to the vertical gives the direction to the food relative to the sun鈥檚 position, and the length of the waggle phase gives the distance.
But how the dancer鈥檚 hive-mates detect and decode this information has remained a mystery. Do they sense vibrations and air flows around the dancing bee, or do they need to touch the dancer directly? 鈥淲e understand very little about the kind of information that honeybees can sense,鈥� says of the Free University of Berlin in Germany. Teasing out the nitty-gritty of how the dance is interpreted by other bees is challenging because it happens so quickly, and because the dancers are crowded out by dozens of followers.
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So De Marco and his colleague Mariana Gil shot high-speed video of 40 dancers and nearly 400 followers. Analysing the footage in slow motion revealed that followers regulate their distance from the dancer so that they can keep in touch with its abdomen with their antennae, which are deflected by the waggles.
Followers were stimulated differently depending on whether they face the dancer from the side or from behind. De Marco believes that bees may interpret the movements they detect through their antennae to determine where they are in relation to the dancer, which would tell them the dancer鈥檚 orientation relative to the vertical 鈥� the right bearing for finding their way to the food.
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De Marco acknowledges that his findings are unlikely to be the final word on how this astonishing method of animal communication works. 鈥淚t would be unwise to imagine that the bees rely on a single pathway,鈥� he says.
In particular, very little is known about how the waggle dance is used outside the hive and in non-experimental set-ups 鈥� something that has caused some biologists to call into question the dance鈥檚 importance in the wild. 鈥淐an the honeybees follow each other? If yes, to what extent? The dance may be great advertisement, but it might well be that more is needed to bring the audience to the actual target,鈥� says De Marco.
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