Honey bees infer source location from the dances of returning foragers

Abstract

Honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica) communicate the direction and distance to a food source by means of a waggle dance. We ask whether bees recruited by the dance use it only as a flying instruction, with the technical form of a polar vector, or also translate it into a location vector that enables them to set courses directed toward the food source from arbitrary locations within their familiar territory. The flights of recruits captured on exiting the hive and released at distant sites were tracked by radar. The recruits performed first a straight flight in approximately the compass direction indicated by the dance. However, this “vector” portion of their flights and the ensuing tortuous “search” portion were strongly and differentially affected by the release site. Searches were biased toward the true location of the food and away from the location specified by translating the origin for the danced polar vector to the release site. We conclude that by following the dance recruits get two messages, a polar flying instruction (bearing and range from the hive) and a location vector that enables them to approach the source from anywhere in their familiar territory. The dance communication is much richer than thought so far.