Data-driven method maps the honey bee dance floor

Quantifying the honey bee dance floor

Honey bees communicate foraging locations through waggle dances, which are concentrated in a specific area of the comb called the dance floor. Historically, this region has been described only qualitatively as 'near the entrance.' Researchers introduce a geometric method that combines convex hulls and confidence ellipses to define the dance floor quantitatively. Applied to 155 observations from eight colonies, the method captures about 91% of dances and reveals systematic differences in dance floor location and shape related to hive size, time of day, and day. This reproducible framework enables standardized comparisons of spatial recruitment patterns across colonies and experimental conditions.