Waggle Dancing: The Buzz on Social "Beehavior"

Figure 1. Honey bee doing a "waggle dance."

Hymenoptera is an order of insects that includes some of the most socially complex animals on earth, including wasps, ants, and bees. Bees fall into the suborder Apocrita, which includes many families and even more genuses. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is one of these, which has highly developed social behaviors in the colonies it forms. One such behavior of interest has been given a somewhat humorous name, the “waggle dance.” Take a look at the inside of a beehive at work, and you might see it. It might seem silly, or perhaps even cute, but this seemingly random and simple dance turns out to be quite practical and complex when taking a closer look! For food that is close by, bees use a “round dance.” This is typically when the food is less than 50 meters away, and simply consists of the bee going around in a circle and switching directions repeatedly. At the end of this dance, she gives other bees a taste of the food she collected, so that they can locate it near the hive [1]. But how can bees find food further from the hive? For this, they must use the waggle dance, which is difficult to master. The waggle dance is used to communicate where food sources are to the hive when they are over 50 meters away. The dance has a waggle phase, where the bee buzzes as she walks in a straight line, vigorously shaking her abdomen left to right, and a return phase, where she walks in a loop back to where she started to repeat the waggle phase. Then, on the next return phase, she turns in the other direction, to make a figure-eight (Figure 2 below shows a visual representation of this) [1].

Figure 2. Diagram of the process of the waggle dance.

 

How should one understand this chain of movement and fancy footwork? Ethologist Karl Von Frisch designed an experiment in 1946 to understand how bees could locate a food source so quickly. He trained bees to go to a food source in a location with a known distance, marking them with little dots. When he observed them returning from the food locations, he discovered they were using this waggle dance, which seemed to communicate three main things [1, 2, 3]. First, the direction. The angle of the waggle run, relative to a vertical line up the comb, indicates the direction the bee should fly in relation to the sun’s position (which can even be adjusted for the time passed since the bee found the location!) [1, 2, 3]. Second, the distance from the hive to the food source is communicated by how long the dance lasts for. And finally, the quality of this source is told by how passionate the dance is. Think about it this way: if you had to do an interpretive dance of where an amazing source of ice cream was compared to a mediocre one, would you not be more passionate and enthusiastic in your dance about the better source? The same goes for these bees. They must dance with the right expressions to tell the other bees all about this food they found! They can even do risk assessment. If a dead bee is found near the food source, dances will become less common and less enthusiastic, because other bees watching may head-butt the dancer to tell her to stop, warning the others of the danger [1]. 

There are multiple layers of complexity to the waggle dance, however. While doing the dance, the bee will give off a smell from two alkanes, possibly communicating even more information that has yet to be fully understood [4]. In addition to this, there may even be electrical signals given off by the dancing bees to tell the others specific details we are unaware of [5]. Other species of social bees will often have different variations to these dances. Cavity-nesting bees for example use gravity and sound to share information about the distance, direction, and quality of the food, most likely due to the darkness of their nests [6]. And despite these differences, research has also shown that over time, different species could understand each other’s dances [7]!

Figure 3. Two honey bees sharing a flower's nectar.

 

This article barely even scratches the surface of how complex and nuanced these dances are, and it is only one specific aspect of the vast world of sociality in bees. Perhaps humans might have a thing or two to learn from their complex and fascinating social behavior that enables them to protect and serve their colonies. The altruism of bees can serve as a lesson to us, that if we are willing to lay down our lives for our fellow brothers and sisters and serve them, even as Christ himself did, we can ensure healthy flourishing for future generations.

Sources:

 

1.     Wilson-Rich, N., Allin, K., Carreck, N., & Quigley, A. (2014). The Bee: A Natural History. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7ztpph

2.     BBC Earth (Director). (2014, September 3). The Waggle Dance  | Inside the Animal Mind | BBC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Q8FfyLLso

3.     Georgia Tech College of Computing (Director). (2011, February 2). The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDGPgXtK-U

4.     Thom, C., Gilley, D. C., Hooper, J., & Esch, H. E. (2007). The Scent of the Waggle Dance. PLOS Biology, 5(9), e228. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0050228

5.     Greggers, U., Koch, G., Schmidt, V., Dürr, A., Floriou-Servou, A., Piepenbrock, D., Göpfert, M. C., & Menzel, R. (2013). Reception and learning of electric fields in bees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1759), 20130528. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.0528

6.     Barron, A. B., & Plath, J. A. (2017). The evolution of honey bee dance communication: A mechanistic perspective. Journal of Experimental Biology, 220(23), 4339–4346. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.142778

7.     Su, S., Cai, F., Si, A., Zhang, S., Tautz, J., & Chen, S. (2008). East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. PLOS ONE, 3(6), e2365. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002365

 

Image Sources:

 

Figure 1: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bee-honeybees-waggle-dance-communicate-lessons-learn-hive

Figure 2: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dance-communication-of-the-honeybees-A-A-forager-that-finds-a-rich-food-source_fig2_235740127

Figure 3:

https://www.honeybeesuite.com/sharing-a-flower/sharing-a-flower/