  The honey bee dance communication system is one of the most popular examples
of animal communication. Forager bees communicate the flight vector towards
food, water, or resin sources to nestmates by performing a stereotypical motion
pattern on the comb surface in the darkness of the hive. Bees that actively
follow the circles of the dancer, so called dance-followers, may decode the
message and fly according to the indicated vector that refers to the sun
compass and their visual odometer. We investigated the dance communication
system with a honeybee robot that reproduced the waggle dance pattern for a
flight vector chosen by the experimenter. The dancing robot, called RoboBee,
generated multiple cues contained in the biological dance pattern and elicited
natural dance-following behavior in live bees. By tracking the flight
trajectory of departing bees after following the dancing robot via harmonic
radar we confirmed that bees used information obtained from the robotic dance
to adjust their flight path. This is the first report on successful dance
following and subsequent flight performance of bees recruited by a biomimetic
robot.
