Honeybee communication

If I had a dollar for every time I exclaimed “honeybees are so cool,” I could retire early. (Though, since I’m already a beekeeper, a hobby many folks pick up in retirement, I’d say I’m doing alright regardless). There are countless reasons that honeybees are, in fact, cool, but today I want to highlight one of their achievements I find most fascinating: dancing—er, I mean, communication.

A colony of honeybees contains hundreds of thousands of individuals, and over the centuries we’ve learned that these masses are masters of collaboration. All those bees function as a superorganism, each individual performing her duties within a group that exists as one unit. In order to thrive, hundreds of thousands of bees need to communicate with each other. Foragers need to tell each other where to find good food sources, scouts must convey to the swarm where they’ve found a potential new home. To achieve this, honeybees developed one of the most complex forms of nonhuman communication we know. Luckily for you and me, scientists have been studying this communication for decades and have managed to translate it.

A Dance Decoded

Honeybees speak to each other in various ways; they utilize their buzzing, they sniff out pheromones, and they dance. Through what’s called the “waggle dance,” for reasons that will become obvious, “the worker honeybee can inform her hive mates of the direction and distance to a rich food source” (Seeley 2010, 9). You can actually observe this behavior pretty easily in a hive. Check out the video below that I recorded in one of my own hives a couple years ago.

The waggle dance consists of two distinct pieces. There’s the bit where the honeybee waggles her body, which is called the waggle run, and there’s the bit where she circles back to her starting position, called the return run. In 1945, University of Munich zoology professor Karl von Frisch realized that “when a bee performs a waggle run inside a dark hive, she produces a miniaturized reenactment of her recent flight outside the hive over sunlit countryside, and in this way indicates the location of the rich food source she has just visited” (Seeley 2010, 10). 

The waggle dance communicates very specific information to the other foragers who have gathered around to watch the dance (look for them in the video!). The dancer isn’t simply saying ‘I’ve found delicious nectar,’ or ‘there’s some good pollen out there.’ Rather, she’s saying ‘I’ve found delicious nectar/good pollen X meters away from the hive, in X direction.’ According to Thomas D. Seeley in his 2010 book Honeybee Democracy:

The duration of the waggle run—made conspicuous despite the darkness (inside the hive) by the dancer audibly buzzing her wings while waggling her body—is directly proportional to the length of the outward journey. On average, one second of the combined body-waggling/wing-buzzing represents some 1,000 meters (six-tenths of a mile) of flight. And the angle of the waggle run, relative to straight up on the vertical comb, represents the angle of the outward journey relative to the direction of the sun. Thus, for example, if a successful forager walks directly upward while producing a waggle run, she indicates that ‘the feeding place is in the same direction as the sun.’ Or, if the waggling bee heads 40 degrees to the right of vertical, her message is, ‘The feeding place is 40 degrees to the right of the sun’” (Seeley 2010, 11).

The return run is also important, as it conveys how desirable the location is, how good the food source. A longer return run indicates a less desirable location, while a shorter return run indicates a better location. In the video, you can see the first waggle dance has a longer return run than the second, with the second dancer essentially just walking a circle before starting the waggle again. Dancer number two found a better resource location that day! (Additionally, both those dancers are carrying pollen, so it’s safe to assume they were advertising where to find the plants they collected it from).

Dancing Democracy

As if that’s not already enough to elicit a “honeybees-are-so-cool,” it turns out that honeybees also utilize the waggle dance when determining where to make a new home. Once a swarm has left their initial hive and coalesced in a cluster on a nearby bush, or fence, or—if they’re my bees—the top of a 40-feet-tall persimmon tree, they send out scouts to look for a new home. Those scouts return to the cluster and perform a waggle dance just like the foragers described above. Where, within the hive, foragers dance on the surface of the honeycomb, these scouts dance on the surface of the cluster, and just as there are many foragers dancing within a hive to indicate multiple foraging locations, multiple scouts dance on the cluster to indicate multiple housing options. In fact, of the approximately 10,000 worker bees in a swarm, a few hundred are scouts, and a few dozen of those tend to find sites suitable enough to write (or dance) home about. But here’s the really incredible thing: all those different dances eventually become the same dance, as the hive selects the best new home. 

In 1951, von Frisch’s protege Martin Lindauer studied swarm behavior and noted, as Seeley summarizes, “When dancers started to appear on a swarm, they announced a dozen or more widely separated locations, but after a few hours or a few days, they began to announce one location in increasing numbers. Ultimately, during the last hour or so before the swarm took off to fly to its new home, the bees dancing on the swarm all indicated just one distance and direction” (Seeley 2010, 15). 

Fascinatingly (“honeybees are so cool!”), this site selection process is undeniably democratic. Those few dozen scouts who find a suitable homesite of course do not all find homesites that are equally suitable. Some are naturally better than others; more dry, better wind protection, better size, etc. And the scout bees are aware of this, they know exactly the kind of home they’re looking for, and they know how the site they’ve found stacks up against that ideal. 

To communicate just how good or mediocre the site they’ve found is, each scout adjusts the number of circuits (one waggle run and one return run) they complete when they perform the waggle dance back at the swarm. A better site will elicit more circuits, and win the attention of more scouts, those scouts who came back to the swarm having found no suitable site. These scouts look to those few dozen who did find something, watch their dances, and check on their finds. They then return to the swarm with their own waggle dance, completing enough circuits to convey just how good the site is. Seeley again: “Good decision making by a honeybee swarm depends critically on the scouts adjusting dance strength in relation to site quality, so that scouts advocating higher quality properties are better at attracting additional supporters.” Through this process, eventually the scouts all agree on the best place to make their new home.

More Than a Dance

The waggle dance is a versatile method of communication, as foragers and scouts are able to adjust each piece of the dance to convey exactly what they need to. It’s more than a dance, it’s a complex language for an incredible organism. It’s also pretty darn cute (seriously, how many times have you watched that video?). I am constantly in awe of honeybees; I feel like I learn some new jaw-dropping fact about them every week, and I promise to share more of them with you over the coming months.

Works Cited

Seeley, Thomas D. Honeybee Democracy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010