The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance

Abstract

The honey bee waggle dance, which encodes food location, is often thought to involve only one-way information transfer from dancers to signal receivers. Here, we show that the information content of the dance is influenced by the presence of followers and the number of appropriately aged potential followers in the hive, rather than the total number of bees on the dance floor. Dancers reduced the precision of directional and distance communication when they had fewer actual and potential followers. Even when the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances, dancers showed the same declines in precision. These declines appear to arise as a byproduct of audience seeking during the return run, when dancers with fewer followers spent more time moving and covered greater distances across the dance floor. Although their mean waggle run duration and the distance covered per waggle run remained unchanged, both measures became markedly more variable when followers were scarce. Dancers likely use quorum sensing of tactile contacts and, potentially, age-specific odors to sense audience size. These results reveal that waggle dancing is a socially responsive process shaped by feedback from followers, demonstrating bidirectional information flow within this communication system.