waggle

It has been known for decades that honeybees do so-called waggle dances, in which their movements and orientation on the honeycomb signal the direction and distance to food outside the hive.

However, until now, it was unclear how the bees gathered around a waggle dancer make sense of the information.

This enabled them to track the position of the antennae of the surrounding bees in fine detail during each waggle dance -- which are otherwise a blur to the naked human eye.

Using a computer model that replicates known brain circuits in the bee, the researchers showed that fewer than one hundred neurons are needed to integrate this information and recover the angle and the distance to the food being signalled in a waggle dance.

Insects are known to be capable of social learning in the wild: the best-known example is the so-called waggle dance used by honeybees to communicate the location and quality of flowers.