Overview
- Researchers from UC San Diego, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Queen Mary University report in PNAS that dancers lost precision when attentive followers were scarce.
- Teams manipulated the hive “dance floor” by varying follower numbers and by adding young non‑foraging workers to isolate how audience size and age affect the signal.
- With few or too‑young followers, dancers wandered more, ran fewer circuits, and their angle for direction and duration for distance varied more than normal.
- Frequent antennal and body contacts from followers likely informed dancers about who was watching, pointing to tactile cues as the feedback channel.
- The authors say the results reveal two‑way communication in bee foraging and could inform how engineers design swarm robots and other distributed systems that rely on shared signals.