World Bee Day dance discovery

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]It's World Bee Day, a day designated to celebrate the tiny pollinators that play a huge role in our environment. From producing honey to pollinating plants, bees are some of the hardest-working creatures on this earth, and when it comes to communication, bees do it through dance. The unique method is known as the waggle dance, and researchers at the University of Manitoba have found a way to mimic it.

[00:00:22]Byron Vanness led the team behind that discovery and joins me now to talk more about why it is all the buzz. Byron, good to speak with you.

[00:00:31]Hello. Thank you for having me. Uh first, can you explain what exactly the waggle dance is and why it's so significant?

[00:00:38]So, the waggle dance is actually probably the most famous communication system in nature, and it is a honey bee wagging her body on a dance floor inside the hive, and that dance contains information about the location and quality of a valuable food source or other resource. Now, as the saying goes, they say, you know, you should dance like no one's watching, but I understand this is not true for bees. They actually cater this waggle dance to their audience. Can you explain a bit about that?

[00:01:07]Yes, but they're not exactly watching cuz it is completely dark inside the hive. It's dark and crowded and noisy, so they need to have some other way of attracting recruits, attracting watchers, and so they do this through vibrations and sounds, and it appears an electric field that the other bees can detect and pay attention to. And your team has developed a a device that kind of mimics this. How does it work?

[00:01:33]So, when when any object is flying through the air, the air friction rips electrons off of it, and the object becomes positively charged. So, in this case, the positively charged honey bee is performing that waggle dance inside the hive, and that charge is moving with her, and that wiggles the antennae of the bees nearby. So, they just look for that, we think, and um it's probably combined with other information like vibrations on the comb, the honeycomb, and other important signals that all together communicate this together. And and and we're we're doing this electrical waggle dance generator just to try to understand what this one component of the signal means cuz we don't understand this one as well as the others. How do you see this device being used? And and what could it mean for bee conservation?

[00:02:23]Well, it's it doesn't have any direct application to conservation except for the fact that we need to understand these these animals better, right? For one thing, they feed us and they're they are in danger. There's a lot of habitat loss and pesticide problems and the better we understand their biology, the better we understand how they act when they are healthy, the better we'll be able to help them through these challenging times as they face these stressors. All right, now that you've developed this device, what are your next steps? What do you hope to to do with it?

[00:02:57]Well, I have two students right now who are going to continue working with it this summer and they're looking at whether there are specific signals within the dance or they're just responding to to any electric field. And we don't know yet if there's actually specific information in the electric field or if it's just they see an electric signal and they go for it. And then the other one is it appears that nurse age bees don't pay attention to it, but foragers do, which makes perfect sense. And so those are our tasks for the summer. Fascinating. Byron, you'll have to report back on what you find out. Great speaking with you. All right, thank you.