What is the honeybee waggle dance? Honeybees do a waggle dance to communicate the distance and the direction away from the hive of a patch of flowers. It demonstrates that bees can remember information, communicate that information, and that other bees can understand it. It is a fairly complex type of communication.
When you think of a stereotypical bee, you are probably thinking of a bumblebee. There are 250 different species of bumblebees, but there are only 8 species of honeybees. So, what is the main difference between honeybees and other types of bees? Well, as it says in their name, honeybees make
. There are other types of bees that also make honey, but honeybees are the most common. If, like me, you had assumed that all bees made honey, you would be mistaken. Bumblebees do collect nectar, but they don’t take the extra steps required to turn it into honey. One of the main reasons for this is that honeybee colonies are far larger than those of most other bees, and they need a store of food to survive through the winter.
Honeybees make honey from the raw nectar that the forager bees bring back to the nest. Nectar is produced by flowers as an incentive for the honeybees to crawl inside and get covered in their pollen. The bees store the nectar in their honey stomach and fly back to the hive with it. Nectar is made of complex sugar, and enzymes in the bees’ honey stomach begin the process of breaking those sugars down into simple sugars. When they get back, the forager bees pass the broken down nectar to house bees, which then pass the nectar mouth to mouth to slowly remove the water from it. Once the water content is low enough, the house bees secrete the honey in a hexagonal honeycomb cell, and then they fan it with their wings to evaporate even more water. Honey usually has a water content below 20%, which, along with so much sugar, is the reason why it doesn’t rot.
Honeybees need a lot of nectar to make their honey. A honeybee can carry about 0.04 grams of nectar, and about half of that ends up being water that is evaporated off. That means it takes a huge number of honeybees an enormous number of trips to make enough honey for the hive. It makes sense that honeybees have evolved a method to tell other honeybees when they find a particularly rewarding patch of flowers with a lot of nectar so that more bees can fly out and harvest the nectar. This is their wiggle dance.
When a honeybee encounters a good patch of flowers, it will fly back to the hive and start dancing to inform the other bees. Other honeybees will come out of the hive to watch. The bee needs to convey three things: the quality of the nectar, the distance to the flowers, and the direction of the flowers. The first thing, the quality of the nectar, is done by bringing back some of that nectar and allowing the other bees to smell and taste it. The second thing, the distance, is communicated through the dance. The bee will fly a figure of 8 pattern in front of the hive. It will fly a waggle section, then loop around back to the start, fly the waggle section again, then loop the other way back to the start, and repeat. The waggle section corresponds to the distance to the flowers. The second thing is the direction of the flowers. The bees use the sun to mark this. They fly the waggle part of their figure of eight at a different angle to the sun, depending on its location. If the flowers are directly ahead of the nest, towards the sun, the bee will fly a vertical line. If the flowers are at an angle of 50 degrees away from the sun, the bee will fly at an angle of 50 degrees away from the sun.
This is all very impressive, and it has even been called a language because of the bees’ ability to communicate information and for other bees to understand that information. However, studies have shown that bees don’t really use the waggle dance of other bees to find nectar. Generally, only about 10% of bees that watch a waggle dance use it, and not that many of those bees actually manage to find the food the first bee was trying to tell them about. There is a strong possibility that the waggle dance didn’t evolve for the purpose of finding food, but to find a new nest site. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://askabiologist.asu.edu/games-sims/bee-dance-game/introduction.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee
https://www.omlet.co.uk/guide/bees/honey_and_wax/a_jar_of_honey
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/top-view-of-bees-putting-honey-56876/