WHEN honeybees dance to point their hivemates towards nectar-rich flowers, they waggle in a slightly different direction each time. It is sometimes claimed that this variability benefits the hive by helping bees locate new resources, but an experiment by David Tanner and Kirk Visscher from the University of California, Riverside, seems to have overturned this theory.
By observing bees trained to visit artificial sugar-traps, Tanner and Visscher discovered that rather than picking a flight path based on the angle of any one waggle, the bees flew off in a direction that more closely matched the mean angle of several waggles (…
