Editorial: Ballroom Biology: Recent Insights into Honey Bee Waggle Dance Communications

In his 1950 book Bees: Their Vison, Chemical Senses, and Language, Karl von Frisch recounts his decades of research into how honey bees perceive the world, concluding “The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.” (von Frisch, 1950). Sixty-five years on, science continues to draw from that magical well, and we have learned a tremendous amount about honey bee foraging, nest site selection and recruitment. We now understand a great deal about how the decisions made by individual bees, which usually have limited information, translate into colony-level decisions in an unpredictable environment. When studying honey bee behavior, it is impossible to ignore the role the unique waggle dance plays in the life of the bee. Honey bees use the dance to communicate the location of resources. The discovery and subsequent decoding of the waggle dance would earn Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize in 1973. The waggle dance is the inspiration behind the nine contributions, spanning from original experimental research to emerging methods, which we present here in this special Frontiers issue.