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A successful honey bee forager tells her nestmates the location of good nectar and pollen with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that communicates a distance and direction. Because bees are adept at scouting out profitable forage and are very sensitive to energetic reward, we can use the distance that bees communicate via waggle dances as a proxy for forage availability, where the further the bees fly, the less forage can be found locally. Previously we demonstrated that bees fly furthest in the summer compared with spring or autumn to bring back forage that is not necessarily of better quality. Here we show that August is also the month when significantly more foragers return with empty crops (P = 7.63e-06). This provides additional support that summer may represent a seasonal foraging challenge for honey bees.

Successful honey bee foragers communicate where they have found a good resource with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that encodes a distance and direction. Both of these components are repeated several times (1 to > 100) within the same dance. Additionally, both these components vary within a dance. Here we discuss some causes and consequences of intra-dance and inter-dance angular variation and advocate revisiting von Frisch and Lindauer’s earlier work to gain a better understanding of honey bee foraging ecology.