Automatic detection and decoding of honey bee waggle dances

The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication. Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor display. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource in the field. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer’s movements and then search for the advertised spots in the field. Throughout the last decades, biologists have employed different techniques to measure key characteristics of the waggle dance and decode the information that it conveys. Early techniques involved the use of protractors and stopwatches to measure the dance orientation and duration directly from the observation hive. Recent approaches employ digital video recordings from which dance characteristics are extracted using digital protractors on screen. However, manual approaches are very time-consuming. Most studies, therefore, regard only small numbers of animals in short periods of time. We have developed a system capable of automatically detecting, decoding and mapping communication dances in real-time.