The multi-modal extravaganza of honey bee dancing

Karl von Frisch, the Austrian ethologist who is best known for his Nobel-prize winning discovery of the honey bee waggle dance, once said “The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.” For decades, bee scientists, including myself, have felt the thrill of this seemingly endless, magical source that has piqued our curiosity, but it has sometimes been difficult to take a step back long enough to reconsider the well itself — is it perhaps in need of its own renovation? This is the setting for Communication Between Honeybees: More than Just a Dance in the Dark, where Jürgen Tautz lays out his framework for understanding the honey bee waggle dance, one of the most celebrated examples of animal communication. By tracing the history of what we know about bee communication and how we know it, Tautz recharacterizes the dance itself, underscoring that information transfer actually does not end when the dancer and nestmate recruit part ways on the dance floor, but instead continues outside the hive through a woven tapestry of environmental cues and social signals. Importantly, Tautz does not dispute that the waggle dance is a real and significant phenomenon, where a successful forager communicates the distance and direction from the hive to a resource, usually nectar or pollen. Instead, he describes how this canonical explanation is better understood as an imprecise half-truth, where the strict parroting of “a dancer communicates a distance and direction” obscures the importance of other, legitimate aspects of the process.