Honey Bees Dance Better When Someone Is Watching

By U. of Cal. - San Diego, March 23, 2026

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A dancing honey bee (center) is surrounded by an audience of “followers” that carefully interpret the movements of the ultra-fast ‘waggle’ dance. 

Credit: Heather Broccard Bell

Honey bees literally dance better when they have an audience.

Honey bees don’t deliver perfect directions unless someone’s watching closely. When their audience shrinks, their famous waggle dance gets less accurate as they try to draw attention.

“Dance like nobody’s watching” may be good advice for humans, but honey bees operate very differently.

Over the past several years, researchers have made major progress in understanding the honey bee “waggle dance,” a sophisticated form of communication used within the hive. Scientists from the University of California, San Diego and their collaborators have shown how this behavior allows bees to share precise information about the location of food with other members of the colony.

A new study published today (March 23) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the effectiveness of this dance depends not only on the bee performing it, but also on the audience. The findings show that foraging bees are not simply delivering a fixed message. Instead, the accuracy of the directions they provide changes based on how many other bees are paying attention.

How the Waggle Dance Shares Food Location

After finding a valuable food source, a foraging bee returns to the hive and communicates its discovery through a rapid and intricate dance. As other bees watch, the dancer moves forward while shaking its abdomen, then circles back and repeats the sequence within seconds. The angle of the movement indicates the direction of the food relative to the sun, while the length of the dance signals how far away it is.

This behavior allows the colony to efficiently locate and exploit food sources, making it one of the most remarkable communication systems in the animal world.

When honey bee foragers locate a food source, such as this lemonade berry sumac shrub (Rhus integrifolia), they return to the hive and communicate the source through the intricate details of the waggle dance.

 Credit: Heather Broccard Bell

Audience Size Affects Dance Precision

Professor James Nieh of the UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences compares the behavior to a street performer. When a performer has a large audience, they can concentrate on delivering a consistent act. But when fewer people are watching, they may shift their position, scan for attention, and adjust their performance to draw in a crowd.

A similar tradeoff occurs in bees. When fewer hive mates follow the dance, the forager moves around more to attract attention. This added movement makes it harder to maintain the exact pattern needed for precise communication.

“Everyone has seen a street musician or a performer adjust to a changing crowd,” said Nieh, a faculty member in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. “In the hive, we see a comparable tradeoff. When fewer bees follow, dancers move more as they search for their audience, and the dance becomes less precise.”

Experiments Reveal Role of Social Feedback

Working with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Queen Mary University of London, Nieh and his colleagues studied bees in controlled hive environments designed to mimic natural conditions.

In one set of experiments, they varied the number of bees present in the main dancing area to see how audience size influenced performance. In another, they kept the number of bees the same but altered the audience by introducing younger worker bees, which typically do not follow dances. In both cases, the dancers became less accurate when their audience was smaller or less engaged.

“The waggle dance is often presented as a one-way information transfer,” said Ken Tan, the senior author of the study and a researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Our data show that feedback from the audience shapes the signal itself. In that sense, the dancer is not only sending information, but also responding to social conditions on the dance floor.”

How Bees Sense Their Audience

The researchers also uncovered clues about how bees detect who is watching. Audience members frequently touch the dancer with their antennae and bodies. These physical interactions likely help the performing bee gauge both the number and type of followers nearby.

Lars Chittka, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London, said the study shows that “humans aren’t the only ones who perform differently depending on their audience. Our study shows that honey bees quite literally dance better when they know someone is watching. When followers are scarce, dancers wander around searching for listeners — and in doing so, their signals become fuzzier. It’s a lovely reminder that even in the miniature world of insects, communication is a deeply social affair.”

What This Means for Animal Communication

Beyond honey bees, the findings provide insight into how groups of animals share and manage information. Many collective systems rely on signals that must be repeated, received, and acted upon by others.

“The new findings show that the accuracy of a signal can depend on the availability of receivers, not only on the motivation of the sender,” said Nieh. “That kind of feedback may be important in animal societies, engineered swarms and other distributed systems where the quality of information can rise or fall with audience dynamics.”

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