NATURE: Like tourists following the animated gestures of a guide, honeybees can decipher a co-worker's interpretive dance to find a good meal, according to a new study in the journal Nature.
In his Nobel Prize-winning research, Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch described how a honeybee scout's figure-eight "waggle dance" within the hive conveys both the distance and direction to a nectar source. The bee's position while tracing the midsection of the pattern, he demonstrated, indicated the angle that other bees should fly relative to the sun. And the extent of her abdominal waggling indicated the distance, he found.
"But what he couldn't prove was that the other bees could actually read it," said J.R. Riley, a research fellow at Rothamsted Research in the United Kingdom, who led the new study.
Critics contended that some bees took their time finding the target. If they had translated the coded "find food here" message from the dancer, shouldn't they have made a beeline for it? Perhaps their cue was an odour trail instead, some suggested.
Until now, no one could say where the bees went after observing a performance. "Everyone thought that the bees must be able to read it. Otherwise, why would the bees develop the dance to begin with?" To answer the question, he and his co-authors used a radar system that provided a fix on a miniature antenna-clad honeybee every three seconds. With the system, the team recorded the flight paths of 19 recruits through a field in Germany.
All 19 followed a similar path to the east of the hive, toward a feeder filled with sucrose. Not every bee found the target, though, much like tourists failing to spot the awning of a cafe. Some bees searched the area for extended periods, accounting for the apparent delay that critics had cited.
Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell University who wasn't involved with the research, said the "excellent" study shows that a bee's route "has everything to do with the information they got from the dancer" whether accurate or not.