Intriguing Discovery: Bees Adapt Their Waggle Dance to the Audience

“Dance as if no one is watching you.” Recent experiments show that this popular saying does not apply to bees, insects renowned for their intelligence, which adapt their movements to their audience.

The Waggle Dance

First described by the German ethologist at the very start of the 1950s, the waggle dance is a sophisticated form of social communication that helps bees tell other members of the hive where food sources lie. Broadly speaking, it involves eight-shaped loops that reveal the direction to follow, and its duration is closely tied to the distance to those sources.

In work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ken Tan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues found that the number of observers influenced the performance of these winged dancers.

“We often present the waggle dance as a unidirectional transfer of information, but our research shows that the audience’s reactions shape the signal itself,” the researchers write.

When the bees performed in front of a dense crowd, they carried out precise and reliable movements, providing cues of quality. When the audience was sparse, they became noticeably more ragged, with dancers seeming to desperately try to attract new spectators.

A Matter of Quantity and “Quality”

The second phase of the experiment involved testing two types of audiences: juvenile, non-foraging bees and adults. In the latter case, the bees were far more focused and engaged, demonstrating that the number of spectators, and their nature, condition their performance.

“Humans are not the only ones to behave differently depending on their audience,” recalls Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London. “This is a good illustration that, even in the tiny world of insects, communication remains a deeply social affair.”

As essential cogs of many ecosystems, bees around the world are currently in sharp decline. A few months ago, two Peruvian municipalities granted Amazonian species the right to be legally recognized and represented in court.