Overview
- A PNAS study finds honey bee foragers dance with less precision when few followers attend or when most watchers are young and not engaged.
- The waggle angle points to the food relative to the sun, and the waggle duration gives the distance.
- In controlled hives that varied crowd size and age, dancers searched for listeners when followers were scarce, which made their paths less straight.
- Frequent antennal and body contacts let dancers gauge audience size and makeup, likely cueing them to tighten or relax the choreography.
- The authors from UC San Diego, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Queen Mary say receiver availability can set information quality in animal groups and engineered swarms.