Geolocating Bees by Translating the Waggle Dance Into Spatial Coordinates

Abstract

Abstract. Bees can communicate the location of interesting resources to forage to their nestmates by performing what we call a waggle dance. Being able to precisely decode the information conveyed with waggle dances would help biologists, ecologists, beekeepers, and even decision-makers to limit the current decline of bees. The challenge addressed in this paper is to find the best way to model in a spatial database the directions given by the waggle dance, and the best way to visualize them.We propose first a method to collect the direction information in a video from an observation hive. Then, we propose three methods to model the uncertain locations indicated by the waggle dance, using a kind of box-plot geometry, clustering and heatmaps. An experiment to find the resources from our maps on the field shows that the heatmap representation is the most promising.