Do The Waggle Dance

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ll hold my hands up and say it – I’m scared of bees. Yes, I know it’s silly, they’re kinda cute and they’re incredibly important pollinators, but stinging, flying insects are a still a no from me. Despite this fear, I do think that bees are pretty darn cool!

Honeybees, of the genus Apis, are eusocial insects, meaning they have a high level of organised sociality. The characteristics needed for an insect to be considered eusocial are as follows:

• Cooperative brood care
• Division of labour (reproductive/non reproductive groupings)
• Overlapping of generations

But we’ll cover the whole eusociality thing in more detail some other time (it’s fascinating!)

Honeybees are actually able to communicate through two forms of dance, known as the waggle dance and the round dance, which are currently the only forms of symbolic communication known to exist in invertebrates. The waggle dance is used to point other members of the hive to valuable resources in order to recruit more foragers [1]. This dance involves the bee waggling back and forth along a straight line, before circling back around to repeat the dance. The straight line is known as the waggle run.

This dance tells the other bees in the hive both the direction and distance at which the resource lies. As distance from the hive to the resource increases, so does the average length of the waggle run. The angle between the direction of the resource and the sun is communicated through the orientation of the waggle-runs relative to the direction of gravity [2]. Smart, eh!

The round dance communicates to the hive that the resource is close by, and it involves the dancing bee walking around in a circle repeatedly, sometimes throwing in a small waggle. It has been theorised that the length of the small waggle is there to communicate the quality of the resource that has been located [3].

So there you have it, bees can 'talk' via dance! If you fancy reading more about this, I've popped links to the references below.

Emily

References

1            Barron, A. B. and Plath, J. A. (2017)The evolution of honey bee dance communication: a mechanistic perspective. J.Exp. Biol., The Company of Biologists Ltd 220, 4339–4346.

2            De Marco, R. J. and Menzel, R. (2008)Learning and Memory in Communication and Navigation in Insects. Learn. Mem. ACompr. Ref., Academic Press 477–498.

3            Arizona State University. (2019) BeeWaggle Dance.

All views my own.

All information correct at time of publishing.