Decoding information in the honeybee dance: revisiting the tactile hypothesis

The waggle dance of honeybees, Apis mellifera, is one of the most remarkable communication systems of the animal kingdom. In this study, we focused on a major gap in the understanding of this striking behaviour: the question of the sensory modality by which meaningful information is transferred from dancers to followers. We revisited the hypothesis that tactile stimuli convey information about the direction relative to gravity and the length of the waggle phase. It has long been suggested that followers use tactile stimuli arising from the wagging movements of a dancing bee to decode information in the dance. Yet, the questions of whether and to what extent such movements are mapped to the tactile experience of the followers have never been resolved. Using high-speed video techniques, we found that the higher the number of the dancer’s wagging movements, the higher the number of the followers’ antennal deflections. We also documented that most followers faced the dancers laterally and experienced a fairly regular pattern of tactile stimuli; a much smaller proportion of followers faced the dancers from behind and became the subject of a different, although still regular, pattern of tactile stimuli. From these observations, we conclude that tactile mechanosensory input from the antennae, presumably processed by neurons of the antennal joint hair sensilla and the neck hair plates, enables bees to estimate both the direction relative to gravity and the length of the waggle phase.