Do honey bees tune error in their dances in nectar-foraging and house-hunting?

The tuned-error hypothesis states that natural selection has tuned the divergence angle in the dances of the honey bee to produce an optimal scatter of recruits across a resource. Weidenmuller and Seeley (Behav Ecol Sociobiol 46:190-199, 1999) supported this hypothesis by finding smaller divergence angles in dances indicating potential home sites, which are always point sources, than in dances indicating food sources, which often occur in patches. This study tested for the same effect, but controlled for variables, e.g., substrate and context, that may have confounded those results. When performed on the same substrate, divergence angle does not differ between dances for the two resources. Furthermore, dances performed for food within an observation hive exhibit significantly greater divergence angle when performed on comb (as Weidenmuller and Seeley measured food dances) than on hardware cloth (as they measured home-site dances on a swarm). These findings suggest that the angular variance in direction indication in dances is more likely an artifact of physical constraints, rather than an adaptive modification of a behavior that a bee could perform more precisely.