When a bee wants to tell its hive mates how to find a scrumptious field of flowers, it wiggles its rear end. A complicated combination of figure eight–like movements known as a waggle dance tells nearby bees what direction to fly in and how far to go. But what happens if a waggling bee is unsure of its directions?
A study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology earlier this year shows that bees amplify their communication based on how certain they are that their information is true. It seems the more confident a bee is in what it’s conveying, the more emphatically it communicates with the hive, says study lead author Karmi Oxman, a behavioral ecologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Confidence is sort of a human-y word, but it’s useful in this context,” Oxman says. Confidence reflects the communicator’s belief in a message’s relevance or reliability, “and the dance is a self-report of the situation in the field.” This extra information also prevents the bee from accidentally misleading the hive.
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The experiment started with one bee flying to a specialized feeder. This first bee, also known as the focal bee, was always met with a sugar solution. The researchers then manipulated the scenario by changing what happened after the focal bee returned to the hive and gave directions to the feeder. In the “honest” scenario, the feeder remained full, and all the bees following the directions got a sugary treat. In the “liar” scenario, the feeder was found empty. And in the “unverified” scenario, all the bees were caught before they could return to the hive and report what happened.
When given the chance to communicate the feeder’s location to the hive again in a later experimental stage, the focal bee in the honest scenario tried harder to convince its fellows to visit the sugar source by performing more waggle dance circuits—suggesting the bee could assess the reliability of its own signal. Unverified and “liar” bees did not show that same increase; in fact, unverified bees decreased their recruitment efforts.
“For me, the big takeaway is that bees are not little robots,” says James C. Nieh, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “They’re getting information from their environment, and that [information] also includes how successful they are in communicating to their nest mates.”
Both Oxman and Nieh say they wonder what other types of communication beyond what we can see—such as chemical signals or vibrations—could be playing a role in waggle dances. Further research into how bees communicate can help with efforts to “maintain the world in a way that they can still thrive,” Nieh says.
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