Honeybee waggle dance error: adaption or constraint? Unravelling the complex dance language of honeybees

• Honeybees dance to recruit nestmates to food sources.
• The dance encodes both distance and directional information.
• The dance can be rather inaccurate, especially when the source is nearby.
• We discuss two mutually exclusive hypotheses explaining the dance error.
• We conclude that the bees are constrained and dance as best they can.

The honeybees' (genus Apis) waggle dance is the only known example of a symbolic language in a nonprimate species. Through a complex series of stereotyped movements, a bee returning from a foraging trip can indicate to her nestmates the direction, distance and quality of a nectar, pollen or nest resource she has located. The ‘waggle’ component of the dance (indicating directional information) contains an inherent error and this error becomes smaller the further the site danced for. The imprecision in the dance effectively spreads dance followers over a patch that remains relatively constant with increasing distance to a resource. This error has been proposed to be a colony-level adaptation and to confer an advantage in the context of foraging. An alternative explanation for the error in the bees' dance is that the bees simply cannot be more precise due to constraints inherent to the dance. Here we analyse all studies to date that have investigated the bees' dance error. We conclude that the error in the honeybee waggle dance is nonadaptive and that the bees dance as best they can.