It has been suspected for many centuries that honey bees (genus Apis) can recruit nestmates to especially rich food sources. Aristotle wrote in his Historia Animalium in 350 B.C. that “…each bee on her return [from a foraging trip] is followed by three or four companions.” Additionally, beekeepers had long noticed the curious abdomen-wagging behavior of returned foragers inside the hive. In addition, it had long been noticed that a good food source (e.g., a dish of sugar syrup) could sit out unvisited for a long time, but soon after one bee came to it, she would be followed by many others. It took Karl von Frisch in the mid-twenty-ninth century to put these observations together and devise experiments to show that the long-held suspicion of beekeepers and others were well-founded. The bees are not just recruiting nestmates to forage but are directing them to a general location by means of the waggle dance.
In the succeeding decades, researchers have worked out the structure of this...
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Couvillon, M.J. (2021). Communication: Honey Bee Dances. In: Starr, C.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Insects. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28102-1_58
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