Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees

A honeybee's waggle dance is an intriguing example of multisensory convergence, central processing and symbolic information transfer. It conveys to bees and human observers the position of a relatively small area at the endpoint of an average vector in a two-dimensional system of coordinates. This vector is often computed from a collection of waggle phases from the same or different dancers. The question remains, however, of how informative a small sample of waggle phases can be to the bees, and how the spatial information encoded in the dance is actually mapped to the followers' searches in the field. Certainly, it is the variability of a dancer's performance that initially defines the level of uncertainty that followers must cope with if they were to successfully decode information in the dance. Understanding how a dancer's behaviour is mapped to that of its followers initially relies on the analysis of both the accuracy and precision with which the dancer encodes spatial information in the dance. Here we describe within-individual variations in the encoding of the distance to and direction of a goal. We show that variations in the number of a dancer's wagging movements, a measure that correlates well with the distance to the goal, do not depend upon the dancer's travelled distance, meaning that there is a constant variance of wagging movements around the mean. We also show that the duration of the waggle phases and the angular dispersion and divergence of successive waggle phases co-vary with a dancer's orientation in space. Finally, using data from dances recorded through high-speed video techniques, we present the first analysis of the accuracy and precision with which an increasing number of waggle phases conveys spatial information to a human observer.