The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance

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Abstract
Karl von Frisch won a Nobel prize for discovering that when honeybee foragers return to the hive after discovering a new food source, they perform a ‘waggle dance’ conveying coded information about the range and bearing of the food. He hypothesized that ‘recruits’ attending the dance read the code, and use the information to get to the food. Sceptics suggested that the watching bees simply picked up food odours from the dancer and then searched for the food by smell. Though most biologists are inclined to von Frisch's view of the dance as a source of information, the quantitative description of how the ‘code’ is translated into a flightplan has been lacking. Now with the advent of a radar tracking system capable of following the flight paths of individual recruits, Riley et al. show that the bees not only read the dance, but allow for wind drift on their way to the target. In the ‘dance language’ of honeybees1,2, the dancer generates a specific, coded message that describes the direction and distance from the hive of a new food source, and this message is displaced in both space and time from the dancer's discovery of that source. Karl von Frisch concluded that bees ‘recruited’ by this dance used the information encoded in it to guide them directly to the remote food source, and this Nobel Prize-winning discovery revealed the most sophisticated example of non-primate communication that we know of3,4. In spite of some initial scepticism5,6,7,8,9, almost all biologists are now convinced that von Frisch was correct3,4,10,11,12,13,14, but what has hitherto been lacking is a quantitative description of how effectively recruits translate the code in the dance into flight to their destinations. Using harmonic radar15,16,17 to record the actual flight paths of recruited bees, we now provide that description.

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