Honeybees vary collective decision making across landscapes

Honeybee ( Apis mellifera ) colony foraging decisions arise from the waggle dances of individual foragers, refined and filtered through a series of feedback loops that produce emergent collective behaviour. This process is a key example of animal communication at the height of eusociality, but a growing body of evidence suggests that its value for colony foraging success is heavily dependent on local ecology. Here, we develop a method to quantify the extent to which a colony forages collectively based on dance-decoding and show how it can be used to relate variation in collective foraging to land-use. We find that the extent to which colonies forage collectively varies across landscape types, such that it is sometimes almost entirely dominant but at other times almost negligible. By providing a means to identify the ecological conditions in which waggle dances are important on a large scale and without experimental manipulation, our methodology opens the door to exploration of the selection pressures that may have driven the evolution of this remarkable group behaviour. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.