Dynamic antennal positioning allows honeybee followers to decode the dance

The honeybee waggle dance has been widely studied as a communication system, yet we know little about how nestmates assimilate the information needed to navigate toward the signaled resource. They are required to detect the dancer's orientation relative to gravity and duration of the waggle phase and translate this into a flight vector with a direction relative to the sun1Frisch K.V. Die polarisation des himmelslichtes als orientierender faktor bei den tänzen der bienen.Experientia. 1949; 5: 142-148Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar and distance from the hive.2Srinivasan M. Zhang S. Lehrer M. Collett T. Honeybee navigation en route to the goal: visual flight control and odometry.J. Exp. Biol. 1996; 199: 237-244Crossref PubMed Google Scholar,3Esch H.E. Zhang S. Srinivasan M.V. Tautz J. Honeybee dances communicate distances measured by optic flow.Nature. 2001; 411: 581-583Crossref PubMed Scopus (223) Google Scholar Moreover, they appear capable of doing so from varied, dynamically changing positions around the dancer. Using high-speed, high-resolution video, we have uncovered a previously unremarked correlation between antennal position and the relative body axes of dancer and follower bees. Combined with new information about antennal inputs4Currier T.A. Matheson A.M. Nagel K.I. Encoding and control of orientation to airflow by a set of drosophila fan-shaped body neurons.eLife. 2020; 9e61510Crossref PubMed Scopus (25) Google Scholar,5Matheson A.M.M. Lanz A.J. Medina A.M. Licata A.M. Currier T.A. Syed M.H. Nagel K.I. A neural circuit for wind-guided olfactory navigation.Nat. Commun. 2022; 13: 4613Crossref PubMed Scopus (22) Google Scholar and spatial encoding in the insect central complex,6Lu J. Behbahani A.H. Hamburg L. Westeinde E.A. Dawson P.M. Lyu C. Maimon G. Dickinson M.H. Druckmann S. Wilson R.I. Transforming representations of movement from body- to world-centric space.Nature. 2022; 601: 98-104Crossref PubMed Scopus (43) Google Scholar,7Lyu C. Abbott L.F. Maimon G. Building an allocentric travelling direction signal via vector computation.Nature. 2022; 601: 92-97Crossref PubMed Scopus (56) Google Scholar we show how a neural circuit first proposed to underlie path integration could be adapted to decoding the dance and acquiring the signaled information as a flight vector that can be followed to the resource. This provides the first plausible account of how the bee brain could support the interpretation of its dance language.