Audience design in bee dancing
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Tao Lin et al., "The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance", PNAS 3/23/2026:
We show that the honey bee waggle dance changes depending on how many followers a dancer has and how many appropriately aged bees are available to follow it. When followers were scarce, dancers became less precise, even if the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances. These declines in precision appear to arise because dancers search more widely for an audience, increasing their movement during the return run. The results suggest that dancers use simple social cues, such as tactile contacts, to sense follower availability. Thus, waggle dancing is not a one-way signal but a socially responsive behavior shaped by feedback from followers.
The biologists behind this paper don't reference the sociolinguistic concept of audience design — though the motivation attributed to the bees ("decline in precision […] because dancers search more widely for an audience") is a bit different from the usual list of sociolingusitic goals.
The UCSD press release of course aims at a different audience from the PNAS paper: "Bee Dancing is Better with the Right Audience", thus illustrating the point.
A bee dancing video:
For another angle on why linguists should care, see "Straw men and Bee Science", 6/4/2011.
AntC said,
March 24, 2026 @ 4:32 pm
How do trainee nestmates get to understand what the wiggle means? With humans, mama and papa can wave and point and jiggle the toy cat within the baby's field of vision.
Do trainee bees just spread out of the nest in random directions and distances, then randomly come across yummy flowers that happen to be at 270°, 750m away, then intuit how to get back to the hive in a straight line, then the penny drops that was what all that wiggling was about? Or do the old hands take the trainees under their wing (hah!) to make the outward journey direct? How do they signal 'follow me'?
Something is awesome. But I'm not sure what. (Also, what if there's actually yummier flowers at 90°, only 500m away?)
KevinM said,
March 25, 2026 @ 11:23 am
So it's powered by likes. Makes sense.
Daniel said,
March 25, 2026 @ 11:56 am
That video impressed me with how iconic (in the linguistic sense) the waggle dance is. The length of the waggle in a straight line seems obviously related to how far to travel. The angle also seems clearly linked to direction.
It seems to bees that the sun is an obvious standard for direction. Within the hive, gravity is an obvious direction indicator.
What the newbie bee (newbee?) would need to figure out is whether straight up in the hive means directly toward or away from the sun and the conversion between length of time of the waggle and distance from the hive.
The first is a binary choice and would probably be figured out quickly by observing other bees. The second is a continuous adjustment that could be refined with practice.
(I do wonder how confident the researchers are that the distance indicator is the length of time of the waggle and not the physical length of the waggle. I would guess that the speed of waggle-walking doesn't vary that much.)
Something else that comes to mind is that so far we have been considering how a young bee learns to understand a waggle dance. How would the same bee learn to produce one and learn to refine its accuracy? Would a bee be constantly revising its internal conversion factor for time of waggle to distance when it reads other waggle dances (based on where the food was actually found) and these experiences would then inform its own dances?
All this reminds me of an anecdote in _The Parrot's Lament: And Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity_ by Eugene Linden. Researchers had brought flowers in pots onto a boat in the middle of the lake. Some bees found the flowers and then communicated to the other bees the distance and direction to find the food. According to the book, few bees actually returned to the flowers. Evidently, most bees didn't believe the report that there were flowers in the middle of the lake!
Viseguy said,
March 26, 2026 @ 5:37 pm
Awesome findings, but — at the risk of sounding like Oliver Twist demanding more, please — what are the underlying mechanisms? With respect to direction, is the bee using visual input to triangulate among the hive, the sun, and the flower, and how on earth does a bee brain translate those data points into a direction? With respect to distance, is the bee measuring distance per se or is it marking time from hive to destination (and back?) and converting that measurement into a duration for the wiggle dance? Also, could a single bee in isolation accomplish the feat, or does it depend on input from its hivemates? Do bees compare notes before taking to the dance floor?
Rodger C said,
March 27, 2026 @ 9:15 am
Viseguy, I was taught that bees' directional sense had a lot to do with their ability to perceive polarized light.