Quantifying the honey bee dance floor: A data-driven method for defining and comparing waggle dance regions
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Loading metrics Open Access Peer-reviewed Research Article Ashley E. Wagner, Michele L. Joyner, Edith Seier, Darrell Moore Quantifying the honey bee dance floor: A data-driven method for defining and comparing waggle dance regions Byron N. Van Nest, Ashley E. Wagner, Michele L. Joyner, Edith Seier, Darrell Moore x Published: February 18, 2026 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0341456 Figures AbstractHoney bee (Apis mellifera) foragers perform waggle dances inside the hive to communicate the location of profitable foraging sites to nestmates. These recruitment dances occur within a specific region of the comb, known as the dance floor, but its location and structure have historically been described only qualitatively.
Here we introduce a data-driven geometric method to define and quantify the dance floor from waggle-dance coordinates. The approach combines convex hulls and confidence ellipses to produce a closed region representing the area of highest dance density and yields interpretable spatial metrics including centroid location, area, perimeter, major and minor axes, and orientation. To demonstrate the method’s performance, we applied it to 155 observations of eight colonies in observation hives differing in size and date. Using complementary univariate and multivariate analyses, the framework consistently captured approximately 91% of dances, matching historical estimates based on entrance distance, and detected systematic differences among observations associated with hive size, day, and time (e.g., size-dependent shifts in centroid position and width, and time-of-day effects on orientation), illustrating its sensitivity to experimental and temporal context.
This work provides an explicit quantitative definition of the honey bee dance floor and a reproducible analytical framework for comparing spatial recruitment patterns across colonies, environments, and future experimental designs. Citation: Van Nest BN, Wagner AE, Joyner ML, Seier E, Moore D (2026) Quantifying the honey bee dance floor: A data-driven method for defining and comparing waggle dance regions. PLoS One 21(2): e0341456. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0341456Editor: Olav Rueppell, University of Alberta, CANADAReceived: November 6, 2025; Accepted: January 7, 2026; Published: February 18, 2026Copyright: © 2026 Van Nest et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Data Availability: All data files and R scripts are available from the Figshare repository https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29483207.Funding: This research was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant (https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/Professors-Professeurs/Grants-Subs/index_eng.asp) to BNVN (RGPIN-2020-05690) and by a U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences Grant (https://www.nsf.gov/mps/dms) to MLJ, ES, and DM (NSF 1128954). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. IntroductionOne of the most intriguing forms of animal communication is the waggle dance of honey bees (Apis mellifera). Successful foragers advertise to their nestmates a mathematical vector (direction and distance) to a valuable resource via a series of complex manoeuvres performed on the comb inside the dark hive [1]. These recruitment dances do not occur randomly throughout the nest but are typically concentrated in a distinct area known as the dance floor. The spatial localization of this behaviour likely enhances communication efficiency by focusing both unemployed foragers and experienced reticent foragers in the same physical region where active recruits and successful scouts perform their dances [2–4]. Yet, despite decades of research, the factors shaping the location and structure of the dance floor remain poorly understood. In both natural and managed nests, waggle dances tend to occur near the entrance on free-hanging, empty comb, which may improve vibrational transmission [5–7]. However, free-hanging, empty comb is not required for waggle dance performance; dancing also occurs in commercial and observation hives on combs fully integrated into wooden frames, including brood comb [8–11]. Common to virtually all studies performed to date (in natural, commercial, and observation hives), the dance floor is simply described as being near the hive entrance [1,8–10,12–14]. For instance, Seeley and Towne [15] noted that 94% of dances in a 2-frame observation hive were performed within 24 cm of the hive entrance, with the highest density of dances between 4 and 18 cm from the entrance. However, additional factors have been proposed, including scent-marking by early returning foragers [16], the release of chemical cues that stimulate recruitment [17,18], and preferences for particular substrate types such as brood comb [6,10,19].
Despite this interest, the dance floor has rarely been defined quantitatively. Most studies describe it only qualitatively (e.g., “near the entrance”), limiting the ability to compare spatial recruitment behaviour across colonies, contexts, or experimental conditions. One recent approach by Wario et al. [20] used principal component analysis to summarize dance orientation, but their method does not yield a bounded spatial region or metrics that can be compared systematically across observations. In contrast, our geometric framework generates an explicit, data-driven boundary that can be directly compared across contexts, allowing direct tests of how dance-floor location and shape vary with factors such as comb structure or colony state. The method combines two geometric tools: a convex hull, which traces the outer boundary of all dance points, and a confidence ellipse, which summarizes their statistical spread. Together, these yield a closed region encompassing the core of dance activity and provide biologically interpretable metrics such as area, centroid location, orientation, and spread.
To demonstrate the utility of this method, we apply it to waggle dance data from eight honey bee colonies housed in glass-walled observation hives of two sizes. We use this framework to ask whether dance floor structure (i) varies throughout the day, (ii) changes from day to day, (iii) differs among colonies, (iv) shifts over the course of the season, or (v) depends on the size of the hive.
By addressing these questions with a standardized approach, we aim to clarify how contextual and colony-level factors influence spatial recruitment behaviour and to offer a method that can be adapted for other species and systems in which communication is spatially organized.