Honey bees use a complex form of spatial referential communication. Their “waggle dance” communicates the direction, distance, and quality of a resource to nestmates by encoding celestial cues, retinal optic flow, and relative food value into motion and sound within the nest. We show that correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly.
Shihao Dong et al. ⬩ Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees
added November 22, 2023 ⬩ random excerpt