Nat. Commun. 11, 625 (2020)

The waggle dance is a movement performed by honeybees, which encodes spatial information about foraging sites. The orientation and duration of the dance tells other bees the location of resources. But Bees have more ways of guiding fellow foragers — for example through olfactory cues — and the role of dance compared to odours is unclear. Matthew Hasenjager and colleagues have now found that bees use dance to communicate the location of new feeding sites and rely on olfactory information to remind each other of existing sites.

The team used social network analyses to investigate the relative importance of the different ways in which honeybees communicate information. They constructed a network for each type of signal and compared them to experimental observations to see which network best represented bee interactions. They found that dance plays a key role when bees discover new foraging locations. The findings might aid understanding of which factors led to the evolution of honeybee dance communication.