Reason for Honey Bee's beehive dance mystery solved

U.S. News and World Report
3/15/04
Thomas Hayden

It is a dance, noted a 1945 observer, "consisting of a rapid stamping of the legs and a rhythmic swinging of the body." The jitterbug? The Lindy Hop? Nope. The dance, mysterious until now, is an invention not of the dance hall but of the beehive.

Honey bees are the animal kingdom's premiere danseuses, performing to signal their sisters about, for example, the precise location of distant nectar. Now, researchers report in Ethology, video analysis shows that the shaking, stamping worker bees are performing a "grooming invitation dance." Gathering nectar is sticky business, after all, and honeybees can't reach the base of their own wings to clean them.

How could such explicit body language evolve? "Almost all animal signals we know about arise from incipient behavior that others pick up on," says Thomas Seeley of Cornell University. Picture yourself with an itch you can't quite reach, hopping and waving your arms for help.

http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/department/faculty/seeley/PDFs/Grooming_invitation_(101).pdf