* Not only is the honey bee dance language accepted by the majority of
biologists, its discovery is regarded as a major milestone of
scientific knowledge.

> Von Frisch's realization that dances carry spatial information was surely one of the major discoveries in behavioral biology in the twentieth century. The elucidation of the dance language opened our eyes to the sophistication and complexity of animal behavior and helped establish the study of behavior as a rigorous empirical science. Furthermore, experimental studies of dance language have provided a window to the subjective world of the honey bee. This window has provided an unusually clear view not only of what it is like to be a bee, but more generally of what it is like to be an insect.

* It is an amazing fact that honey bees can indicate where they have
been using a simple dance. But beyond that, they use this same dance
to indicate *where they will go*

> Migrating colonies of both A. dorsata and A. mellifera scutellata depart directly from the natal nest on a long flight in the migratory direction. The migratory dances begin a few days before colony movement, and by the time the colony takes off, dozens of bees perform dances. These dances signal the compass direction in which the colony ultimately departs, and hence resemble nest-site dances on reproductive or absconding swarms. They differ in interesting ways, however.

> First, whereas dances on swarms contain accurate information about both the direction and the distance of the new nest site, the migratory dances are accurate only with respect to direction. Migratory dances are much more variable with respect to the distance signal than are dances to discrete resources.

> Furthermore, the average duration of the waggling run is extremely long, corresponding to flight distances of many tens or hundreds of kilometers. Such distances are well beyond the flight distances that bees could be expected to travel from the nest.

> Finally, observations in the early morning showed that migration dances begin before any bees leave the nest, suggesting that the bees do not base the signal on spatial information gathered on a trip just preceding the dance. These dances could be based on information gathered during flights on previous days, but this behavior still differs dramatically from that observed in dances to discrete resources.

> In short, the migration dances reflect the emergence of a colony-wide consensus about the direction that the colony should travel, but they do not signal actual locations sampled by the dancers. Nothing is known about how migratory directions are chosen or how the consensus is reached.

Source: Fred C. Dyer, in "The Biology of the Dance Language". Annu.
Rev. Entomol. 2002. 47:917–49.

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