Dancing bees speak in code

One complication is that hives are dark and cramped, so other bees – called "recruits" – do not see the full pattern as human observers do. Furthermore, recruits tend to take longer to find the food than would be expected.

"Flying directly, it should only take them a minute or so, but they often don’t find the feeder for 5 or 10 minutes," Riley told LiveScience.

And sometimes they never find it. For this reason, some scientists have speculated that the waggle dance merely excites other bees, which then fly out of the hive searching for a scent trail left by the returning bee.

Making a beeline
To solve the controversy, Riley and colleagues strapped radar transponders to 19 dance spectators. The flight paths show that the bees make a beeline to the vicinity of the food source, but then fly around in a looping search pattern. Only two of the radar-tracked recruits actually found the food.

Apparently, the dance gives incomplete instructions, and the bees rely on odors, colors, and other clues to hone in on the final location. Still, the dance gets them pretty close. On average, the recruits came within 18 feet of the food before switching to search mode.

"This was in spite of considerable wind drift which would have pushed them off course if they had not compensated," Riley said.

To further investigate bee-havior, the team moved some recruits several hundred yards away from the hive and then released them. The displaced bees flew the prescribed direction and distance – where they found nothing because their starting point was off.

This is the most definitive proof that recruited bees read the waggle dance, since the transplanted bees chose the foretold trajectory without any of the possible other cues – odors (bees have a strong sense of smell), landscape, other bees – that might exist along the true hive-to-feeder route.

The work was described earlier this month in the journal Nature.

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