Decoding information in the honeybee dance: revisiting the tactile hypothesis

Keywords: Apis mellifera dance communication honeybee mechanosensory input tactile stimulus waggle dance The waggle dance of honeybees, Apis mellifera, is one of the most remarkable communication systems of the animal kingdom. In this study, we focused on a major gap in the understanding of this striking behaviour: the question of the sensory modality by which meaningful information is transferred from dancers to followers. We revisited the hypothesis that tactile stimuli convey information about the direction relative to gravity and the length of the waggle phase. It has long been suggested that followers use tactile stimuli arising from the wagging movements of a dancing bee to decode information in the dance. Yet, the questions of whether and to what extent such movements are mapped to the tactile experience of the followers have never been resolved. Using high-speed video techniques, we found that the higher the number of the dancer's wagging movements, the higher the number of the followers' antennal deflections. We also documented that most followers faced the dancers laterally and experienced a fairly regular pattern of tactile stimuli; a much smaller proportion of followers faced the dancers from behind and became the subject of a different, although still regular, pattern of tactile stimuli. From these observations, we conclude that tactile mechanosensory input from the antennae, presumably processed by neurons of the antennal joint hair sensilla and the neck hair plates, enables bees to estimate both the direction relative to gravity and the length of the waggle phase. Karl von Frisch (1946) discovered that a highly stereotyped motion pattern that honeybees, Apis mellifera, perform on the comb surface conveys to human observers the circular coordinates of relatively well-defined locations where food or a potential new nest site is found. The term 'waggle dance' denotes a form of this pattern that conveys information about goals located fairly far from the hive (von Frisch 1967). It enables a colony to coordinate the activity of its members during foraging and nest site selection (Seeley 1995). This is possible because those colony members that keep close contact with a dancing bee, called dance followers, detect a variety of signals emitted by the dancer and process them in such a way that their ensuing behaviours depend greatly upon the content of these signals (von Frisch 1967). Several components of the waggle dance are thought to convey spatial information (e.g. von Frisch 1967; Seeley et al. 2000; …