How accurate is the waggle dance?
Short answerIt dependsEmerging research
Accurate enough to be useful and a long way from precise. Recruits arrive spread around the indicated point rather than at it, many leave without extracting a usable vector at all and search or follow scent instead, and the angular scatter in the dance itself is measurable. Whether that scatter is adaptive or a physical limit is argued both ways.
What the radar work showed
Harmonic radar tracking of individually marked recruits showed them flying the vector encoded in the dance, including after being displaced so that the vector pointed somewhere they had never been. That settled the central question. It also showed the arrival scatter directly: recruits reach the right area, then search.
Why the imprecision might be useful
One reading is that scatter is adaptive. Flowers occur in patches rather than at points, so spreading recruits over an area samples the patch better than aiming them all at one spot. The competing reading is that a small animal performing a run on a wax comb simply cannot be more precise than this, and the spread is a limit rather than a design.
What else affects the outcome
- Scent carried on the dancer's body, which helps recruits identify the flower once they are in the right area.
- How many circuits a follower attends, and whether she follows more than one dancer.
- Sleep. Sleep-deprived foragers dance less precisely the following day, giving worse directional information.
Sources
- The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance — Nature (2005) · Peer-reviewed article
- Sleep deprivation impairs precision of waggle dance signaling in honey bees — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2010) · Peer-reviewed article
- Honeybee Democracy — Princeton University Press (2010) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.