The waggle dance is a behaviour well known throughout the beekeeping world and is a mechanism honeybees use to communicate the location of a rich source of forage. The quality, distance, and direction of the resource are all transmitted within the complex dance routine carried out on in the dark of the hive. The foragers understand the signals and duly follow the directions. It’s all part of the complex social organisation and behaviours within the colony, and ensures essential functions and tasks are allocated and carried out efficiently. Making and storing honey is not only an important task but is also critical to the survival of the colony, especially through winter months.
To this end maturer bees take on the task of foraging and bringing much needed pollen and nectar back to the hive. It takes considerable effort for a forager to fly out to the source, collect the nectar, store it in it’s limited honey stomach, then return laden to the hive where it’s unloaded before flying back out to repeat the process as often as the resource is available, and daylight hours and weather permit.
It is a labour intensive task and is organised in a manner to make it as efficient as possible. The waggle dance helps that by communicating information which helps allocate suitable numbers of foragers to the task and keeping time wasted on locating forage to a minimum. Foragers are just that of course, they only forage on this task. When they return to the hive they unload their cargo of nectar to receivers bees by mouth to mouth transfer. The forager is then free to return to foraging while the receiver takes the nectar, converts it to honey and stores it in the honeycomb. All very efficient.
But how does the colony know how many receivers to have ready for the returning foragers in order to maintain a balance of these collectors and storers to keep the operation as efficient as possible? The tremble dance of course! Not only do bees use the waggle dance for instructing foragers, but they also carry out a tremble dance in the hive where the bee uses it’s legs to make its whole body tremble while slowly moving in a deliberate pattern to instruct receivers increase their numbers to match the foragers.
More on this and other interesting if not surprising bee behaviours can be found in Thomas D Seeley’s book ‘Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz Runners. 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved’. Princeton University Press.
