Data from: Honey bees flexibly use two navigational memories when updating dance distance information

Honey bees can communicate navigational information which makes them
unique amongst all prominent insect navigators. Returning foragers recruit
nest mates to a food source by communicating flight distance and direction
using a small scale walking pattern: the waggle dance. It is still unclear
how bees transpose flight information to generate corresponding dance
information. In single feeder shift experiments, we monitored for the
first time how individual bees update dance duration after a shift of
feeder distance. Interestingly, the majority of bees (86%) needed two or
more foraging trips to update dance duration. This finding demonstrates
that transposing flight navigation information to dance information is not
a reflexive behavior. Furthermore, many bees showed intermediate dance
durations during the update process, indicating that honey bees highly
likely use two memories: (i) a recently acquired navigation experience and
(ii) a previously stored flight experience. Double shift experiments, in
which the feeder was moved forward-backward, created an experimental
condition in which honey bee foragers did not update dance duration;
suggesting the involvement of more complex memory processes. Our
behavioral paradigm allows the dissociation of foraging and dance activity
and opens a possibility to study the molecular and neural processes
underlying the waggle dance behavior.