Quantifying the honey bee dance floor: A data-driven method for defining and comparing waggle dance regions
Summary
The article introduces a data-driven geometric framework to quantify the honey bee waggle dance floor by intersecting a convex hull with a 2-SD confidence ellipse. It provides interpretable metrics (area, centroid, orientation, major/minor axes) and shows the method captures about 91% of dances across eight colonies, with dance-floor structure varying by time of day, day of year, and hive size. The study demonstrates a robust approach to analyzing spatial recruitment patterns and suggests extensions to broader ecological and cross-species contexts.