Honeybee Dances Map Healthy Landscapes

Waggling insects could give information that leads to better land-use practices.

Honeybees are all about sharing: When a foraging one finds a great place to eat, she performs a dance for her nestmates that charts a course to the source.

In a paper published today in the journal Current Biology, Margaret Couvillon and colleagues at the University of Sussex in England report on a new technique for assessing landscape health for pollinators—using the pollinators themselves.

Agriculture is typically no friend to nature, and the European Union has spent tens of billions of euros on agri-environment schemes, which offer financial incentives for environmentally friendly farming practices. But little is known about how wildlife, including pollinators, respond to these various schemes.

Couvillon and colleagues at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects

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