Honeybees use dance communication to form expectations of landscape, study shows

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The waggle dance, performed by successful forager honeybees (Apis mellifera) inside the hive, is a well-known form of symbolic communication that informs nestmates about the location of resources. It is well known that the dance encodes only the distance and direction (the vector) to the target. However, it remains unclear whether follower bees integrate the vector information with their own spatial memories of landmarks to optimize navigation.