Quantifying the honey bee dance floor: A data-driven method for defining and comparing waggle dance regions | PLOS One
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Abstract<br>Honey 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):<br>e0341456.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0341456<br>Editor: Olav Rueppell, University of Alberta, CANADA<br>Received: November 6, 2025; Accepted: January 7, 2026; Published: February 18, 2026<br>Copyright: © 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.<br>Data Availability: All data files and R scripts are available from the Figshare repository https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29483207.<br>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.<br>Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction<br>One 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,...