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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Bee Sci.

Sec. Bee Physiology

Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frbee.2025.1654032

This article is part of the Research TopicWomen in Bee ScienceView all 6 articles

Dancing on the Edge: Honey Bee Recruitment Networks are Sparse and Affected by Individuality in Waggle Dance Behavior

Provisionally accepted
Laura  McHenryLaura McHenry1,2*Roger  SchürchRoger Schürch2Lindsay  E JohnsonLindsay E Johnson2Bradley  D OhlingerBradley D Ohlinger2,3Margaret  J CouvillonMargaret J Couvillon2
  • 1The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, United States
  • 2Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, United States
  • 3University of Georgia Odum School of Ecology, Athens, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Social network analysis is increasingly and fruitfully applied to study the collective structure and function of animal societies across space and time. Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are a particularly tractable model system that is rich in social relationships and dynamics. Despite the rich body of literature describing the social life of the honey bee, including the famous waggle dance by which foragers recruit nestmates to profitable resources, relatively little is known about the networks that arise from waggle dance communication. Here we conducted a field experiment with fully-marked experimental colonies (N=2 colonies, 3,000 bees each) to characterize the honey bee waggle dance recruitment network structure and function. Particularly, we studied network density, burstiness in waggle dance bouts, and the effect of individuality in waggle dance communication behavior on network structure. We simulated a maximally-efficient honey bee recruitment network using a deterministic susceptible-infected model. Then we used this simulated network as an upper bound for network density to calculate the proportion of successful recruitment events in observed networks compared to the simulated maximal network. Next, we characterized the burstiness, or temporal distribution, of waggle dance bouts. Finally, we tested whether inter-bee differences, or individuality, in waggle dance communication affected the recruitment network structure. We found that (1) real recruitment networks are sparse, with each individual recruiting up to 3.5% as many nestmates as predicted by the simulated maximal network; (2) individual bees danced steadily, not in bursts, and (3) that individuality in waggle dance calibrations was positively associated with successful recruitment and thus the propagation of the recruitment network (p = 0.008). Our results offer the first empirical and biologically-informed descriptive statistics for honey bee waggle dance networks and may be informative in the parameterization of bio-inspired computing models.

Keywords: Honey bee, waggle dance, recruitment network, Network density, Burstiness, Individuality

Received: 25 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 McHenry, Schürch, Johnson, Ohlinger and Couvillon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Laura McHenry, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, United States

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