We show that the honey bee waggle dance changes depending on how many followers a dancer has and how many appropriately aged bees are available to follow it. When followers were scarce, dancers became less precise, even if the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances. These declines in precision appear to arise because dancers search more widely for an audience, increasing their movement during the return run. The results suggest that dancers use simple social cues, such as tactile contacts, to sense follower availability. Thus, waggle dancing is not a one-way signal but a socially responsive behavior shaped by feedback from followers.

Robert talks to mathematician Barbara Shipman about her cross-disciplinary discovery. In mapping a six-dimensional figure onto two-dimensions, she recognized the pattern as that of the honeybee's ritual dance. To her, this implies that bees can sense the quantum world, since it is in that realm that six-dimensional geometry has real meaning. The bees use the dance to communicate to others in the hive the location and distance of a pollen source.

There are almost no ethics standards for insects. But there is growing evidence that insects feel pain. A 2022 study found that bumblebees react to potentially harmful stimuli in a way that is similar to pain responses in humans.