Blacksburg, United States - February 25, 2025 A groundbreaking study from Virginia Tech has uncovered the hidden dynamics behind the honeybee’s iconic “waggle” dance, revealing that individual dance styles play a surprising role in foraging success. Researchers in the Department of Entomology, led by Associate Professor Margaret Couvillon and her former Ph.D. student Laura McHenry, have found that the secret to a bee’s ability to guide its nestmates to food lies not in uniformity, but in the unique flair each bee brings to its moves. Honeybees are nature’s master choreographers. Their waggle dance, a mesmerizing display of movement, serves as a precise GPS for foraging. The direction of the dance points other bees toward the food source, while the length of the “run” signals the distance they must travel. When a dancer’s performance convinces her sisters, these recruits embark on a mission to locate the bounty she’s described. Yet, despite millions of years of evolution, many recruits fail to find the prize, leaving scientists puzzled. Couvillon’s team set out to unravel this mystery. “Although the waggle dance itself is fascinating, my lab has additionally been intrigued about waggle dance miscommunication, or the hows and whys behind the failure of the dance recruitment,” she explained. Using clear-walled hives, video cameras, and tagged bees, the researchers tracked foragers trained to an artificial food source as they danced to instruct others. By analyzing which dances successfully recruited new foragers, they uncovered unexpected patterns, recently published in Current Biology. The findings flipped their initial assumptions. Bees with similar dance styles didn’t produce the most successful recruits. Instead, dances with longer runs—ones that instructed recruits to overshoot the food’s actual location—proved more effective. This overshooting, the team theorized, gave foragers two chances to spot the target, once on the way out and again on the return trip, boosting their odds of success. This discovery highlights the power of individuality. Far from being a flaw, the diverse “styles” each bee adds to its waggle dance enhance the hive’s collective foraging efficiency. If every bee danced identically, the researchers suggest, fewer would find the food compared to the varied approaches seen in nature. “We’ve known for a while that behavioral and genetic diversity benefit honeybees, allowing for superior thermoregulation, disease resistance, growth, and foraging,” Couvillon noted. “Now we have also seen that diverse communication enhances recruitment success.” For a species celebrated as world-class dancers, honeybees prove that standing out in the crowd isn’t just about flair—it’s a survival strategy. This study adds a new layer to our understanding of their remarkable communication, showing that when it comes to the waggle, a little personality goes a long way. [Credit: Video by Margaret Couvillon for Virginia Tech]