{"id":104551,"date":"2025-10-06T00:59:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T00:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/104551\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T00:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T00:59:10","slug":"honeybees-dance-includes-higher-cognitive-complexity-than-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/104551\/","title":{"rendered":"Honeybees dance includes higher cognitive complexity than thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers studied the famous \u201cwaggle dance\u201d of honeybees, which they use to communicate to one another about the location of resources, to evaluate whether they integrate memory of the terrain into their flight. They do. <\/p>\n

A poetic form of communication, though it may be, the waggle dance is thought to convey only a vector\u2014direction and distance from the hive to a food source. A recent study published in Current Biology investigated the remarkable communication strategy to a new degree of depth.<\/p>\n

Did the dance teach the bees, if you can imagine a bee moving with fear, though emotion didn\u2019t play into this study, to anticipate a bump in the road at a specific point on the journey? Are the bees, in fact, pantomiming the way itself?<\/p>\n

Researchers trained a small group of foragers to visit a feeder located north of a hive along a gravel road. However, they released the bees from three different sites, discovering that the dance was even more complex and detailed than they had originally understood.<\/p>\n

\"\"A diagram of the dance that includes spatial expectations, Wang et al.<\/a><\/p>\n

A truly intelligent and efficient form of communication<\/p>\n

Researchers placed a feeder with a sugar solution north of the hive along a gravel road and trained forager bees to visit it. One site, as\u00a0reported by Phys, had a distinct path, whereas another\u00a0lacked these types of markers.<\/p>\n

Then they let the bees perform their magic trick of dancing to attract mates and indicate where the food was located. They had never visited the hive themselves. Researchers awaited to determine whether any information about the landscape, what to anticipate on the flight itself, was communicated in \u201cthe waggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe employed harmonic radar tracking, a powerful tool for recording the detailed flight trajectories of individual bees,\u201d the study authors wrote.<\/p>\n

Researchers found that the receivers of the dance weren\u2019t just following the direction and distance indicated by the waggle dance. They integrated the dance\u2019s vector information with the memory of landscape features that they might encounter along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the absence of an expected landmark, their search behavior became more exploratory,\u201d according to Phys. \u201cThey flew farther and in less straight paths,\u201d according to a news release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A multifaceted form of communication <\/p>\n

\u201cIn conclusion,\u201d study authors stated in the study, \u201cour experiments addressed the question of whether the vector information conveyed by the dance is integrated into a recruit\u2019s spatial representation\u2014constructed from its own experience\u2014and whether this integration occurs within a common frame of spatial reference shared by both the reported symbolically communicated vector and self-experienced locations.<\/p>\n

The recruits developed an expectation, they continued, about the landscape that they would fly over when bees<\/a> integrated the dance, as if \u201cbody language\u201d communicated so much more than words did. Researchers called it \u201ca multifaceted form of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

What they saw was that the cognitive structure at play here is \u201cmost adequately conceptualized as a cognitive map.\u201d<\/p>\n

So bees are even more impressive than we already give them credit for. These intelligent bees<\/a> aren\u2019t just following the vector; they retain a spatial layout of the environment and incorporate it into their navigation.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur study reveals a higher level of cognitive complexity in honeybee communication. Waggle dance-following bees<\/a> do not simply follow a blind vector instruction; they integrate it with a cognitive map of their surroundings built during earlier exploratory flights. This allows them to form expectations and navigate more efficiently,\u201d said the lead researcher in Phys<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers studied the famous \u201cwaggle dance\u201d of honeybees, which they use to communicate to one another about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[32660,18,65783,19,14009,17,133,65784],"class_list":{"0":"post-104551","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-bees","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-honeybees-dance","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-insects","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-waggle-dance"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}