Honeybees add waggle-dance circuits after the feeder they advertised proves full

The first trip was the same in every condition: the focal bee always found sugar ^[4]. That rules out the early reward as the reason the groups behaved differently later ^[16]. What varied was the outcome for the recruits: a full feeder, an empty one, or no report back at all ^[5].

Karmi Oxman, the study's lead author at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the extra circuits as confidence ^[2]. In the article's gloss, confidence is the communicator's belief in a message's relevance or reliability ^[14]. Oxman said "the dance is a self-report of the situation in the field." ^[9]

James C. Nieh, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, was not involved in the study ^[10]. He frames the result differently. "For me, the big takeaway is that bees are not little robots," Nieh said ^[15]. He added that bees get information from their environment, and that this information includes how successful they are at communicating with their nest mates ^[11].

Oxman's wording is about belief in the message. Nieh's is about whether the message worked. The three conditions changed only what happened after the dance ^[4], and in our view that sits closer to Nieh's description.

Scientific American's account does not report how many bees were tested, how many circuits the honest group added, or how large the difference was against the other two conditions.