Machine learning reveals the waggle drift's role in the honey bee dance communication system.

ABSTRACT: The honey bee waggle dance is one of the most prominent examples of abstract communication among animals: successful foragers convey new resource locations to interested followers via characteristic "dance" movements in the nest, where dances advertise different locations on different overlapping subregions of the "dance floor." To this day, this spatial separation has not been described in detail, and it remains unknown how it affects the dance communication. Here, we evaluate long-term recordings of Apis mellifera foraging at natural and artificial food sites. Using machine learning, we detect and decode waggle dances, and we individually identify and track dancers and dance followers in the hive and at artificial feeders. We record more than a hundred thousand waggle phases, and

SUBMITTER: Dormagen DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10516631 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature