The neurobiology of bee dance communication

Honeybees indicate the vector location of distant food sources to their nestmates by ‘dancing’ inside the hive. Despite decades of study of this behaviour, its neural basis has been relatively unexplored. Recent insights into how the insect brain encodes and manipulates vectors provide crucial clues to understanding how bees could acquire food vectors, both from their own experience and by following a dance: not by independently tracking direction and distance but by continuous integration of translation in a geocentric coordinate framework. For a bee flying to and from a food source, the framework is provided by a time-compensated celestial compass and translation inferred from optic flow projected onto an orthogonal basis. For a bee following a dance, the framework is provided by gravity and the translation inferred from tactile interaction with the dancer. The same circuitry, in the central complex neuropil of the insect brain, could process these respective cues. • The honeybee brain should be able to track geographic north. • The follower integrates the estimated translation of the dancer to obtain a food vector. • Mechanical displacement of the antennae provides the key input to estimate the dancer’s translation.