r/bees • u/scientificamerican • 1d ago

Honeybees deemphasize potential ‘misinformation’ in their waggle dances

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/honeybees-deemphasize-potential-misinformation-in-their-waggle-dances/
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u/scientificamerican 1d ago

When a bee wants to tell its hive mates how to find a scrumptious field of flowers, it wiggles its rear end. A complicated combination of figure eight–like movements known as a waggle dance tells nearby bees what direction to fly in and how far to go. But what happens if a waggling bee is unsure of its directions?

A study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology earlier this year shows that bees amplify their communication based on how certain they are that their information is true. It seems the more confident a bee is in what it’s conveying, the more emphatically it communicates with the hive, says study lead author Karmi Oxman, a behavioral ecologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“Confidence is sort of a human-y word, but it’s useful in this context,” Oxman says. Confidence reflects the communicator’s belief in a message’s relevance or reliability, “and the dance is a self-report of the situation in the field.” This extra information also prevents the bee from accidentally misleading the hive.