Analysis of the Waggle Dance Motion of Honeybees for the Design of a Biomimetic Honeybee Robot

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Abstract

The honeybee dance “language” is one of the most popular examples of information transfer in the animal world. Today, more than 60 years after its discovery it still remains unknown how follower bees decode the information contained in the dance. In order to build a robotic honeybee that allows a deeper investigation of the communication process we have recorded hundreds of videos of waggle dances. In this paper we analyze the statistics of visually captured high-precision dance trajectories of European honeybees ( Apis mellifera carnica). The trajectories were produced using a novel automatic tracking system and represent the most detailed honeybee dance motion information available. Although honeybee dances seem very variable, some properties turned out to be invariant. We use these properties as a minimal set of parameters that enables us to model the honeybee dance motion. We provide a detailed statistical description of various dance properties that have not been characterized before and discuss the role of particular dance components in the commmunication process.

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Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory.

Randolf Menzel, Robert Brandt, Gesine Bundrock … (2005)

By using harmonic radar, we report the complete flight paths of displaced bees. Test bees forage at a feeder or are recruited by a waggle dance indicating the feeder. The flights are recorded after the bees are captured when leaving the hive or the feeder and are released at an unexpected release site. A sequence of behavioral routines become apparent: (i) initial straight flights in which they fly the course that they were on when captured (foraging bees) or that they learned during dance communication (recruited bees); (ii) slow search flights with frequent changes of direction in which they attempt to "get their bearings"; and (iii) straight and rapid flights directed either to the hive or first to the feeding station and then to the hive. These straight homing flights start at locations all around the hive and at distances far out of the visual catchment area around the hive or the feeding station. Two essential criteria of a map-like spatial memory are met by these results: bees can set course at any arbitrary location in their familiar area, and they can choose between at least two goals. This finding suggests a rich, map-like organization of spatial memory in navigating honey bees.

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Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing.

Gavin Sherman, P Kirk Visscher (2002)

The honeybee dance language, in which foragers perform dances containing information about the distance and direction to food sources, is the quintessential example of symbolic communication in non-primates. The dance language has been the subject of controversy, and of extensive research into the mechanisms of acquiring, decoding and evaluating the information in the dance. The dance language has been hypothesized, but not shown, to increase colony food collection. Here we show that colonies with disoriented dances (lacking direction information) recruit less effectively to syrup feeders than do colonies with oriented dances. For colonies foraging at natural sources, the direction information sometimes increases food collected, but at other times it makes no difference. The food-location information in the dance is presumably important when food sources are hard to find, variable in richness and ephemeral. Recruitment based simply on arousal of foragers and communication of floral odour, as occurs in honeybees, bumble bees and some stingless bees, can be equally effective under other circumstances. Clarifying the condition-dependent payoffs of the dance language provides new insight into its function in honeybee ecology.

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A common frame of reference for learned and communicated vectors in honeybee navigation.

Lutz Reiter, Theresa K. Hattenrath-Lehmann, Randolf Menzel … (2011)

Humans draw maps when communicating about places or verbally describe routes between locations. Honeybees communicate places by encoding distance and direction in their waggle dances. Controversy exists not only about the structure of spatial memory but also about the efficiency of dance communication. Some of these uncertainties were resolved by studies in which recruits' flights were monitored using harmonic radar. We asked whether the two sources of vector information--the previously learned flight vector to a food source and the communicated vector--are represented in a common frame of spatial reference. We found that recruits redirect their outbound flights and perform novel shortcut flights between the communicated and learned locations in both directions. Guidance by beacons at the respective locations or by the panorama of the horizon was excluded. These findings indicate a spatial reference based on either large-scale vector integration or a common geocentric map-like spatial memory. Both models predict a memory structure that stores the spatial layout in such a way that decisions are made according to estimated distances and directions. The models differ with respect to the role of landmarks and the time of learning of spatial relations. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Author and article information

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: Role: Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Journal ID (pmc): plosone

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date Collection: 2011

Publication date (Electronic): 3 August 2011

Volume: 6

Issue: 8

Electronic Location Identifier: e21354

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

[2 ]Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Author notes

* E-mail: tim.landgraf@ 123456fu-berlin.de

Performed the experiments: TL KS. Analyzed the data: TL HN FK RR. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: RR. Wrote the paper: TL.

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-10-04022

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021354

PMC ID: 3153927

PubMed ID: 21857906

SO-VID: 51dccb20-f094-42ee-949d-70045b2855a3

Copyright © Landgraf et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 27 October 2010

Date accepted : 31 May 2011

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Pages: 10

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Analysis of the Waggle Dance Motion of Honeybees for the Design of a Biomimetic Honeybee Robot

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Abstract

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Most cited references 20

Honey bees navigate according to a map-like spatial memory.

Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing.

A common frame of reference for learned and communicated vectors in honeybee navigation.

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