Honeybees consider flower danger in their waggle dance

Like most animals, honeybees, Apis mellifera, possess a suite of antipredatory adaptations used to defend their colony against intruders and to avoid flowers associated with predation risk. Honeybees also possess a remarkable ability to communicate the direction, distance and relative profitability of flower patches to hivemates using the well-studied waggle dance. Here we show that honeybees returning from foraging on dangerous flowers are less likely to perform the waggle dance and engage in fewer waggle runs than foragers returning from equally rewarding, safe flowers. Our results indicate that experienced foragers effectively steer naive recruits away from dangerous flowers and raise interesting questions as to how information about the reward and risk properties of patches are integrated into the waggle dance. (C) 2009 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.