  The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication.
Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor
display. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource
in the field. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer's movements and then search
for the advertised spots in the field. Throughout the last decades, biologists
have employed different techniques to measure key characteristics of the waggle
dance and decode the information it conveys. Early techniques involved the use
of protractors and stopwatches to measure the dance orientation and duration
directly from the observation hive. Recent approaches employ digital video
recordings and manual measurements on screen. However, manual approaches are
very time-consuming. Most studies, therefore, regard only small numbers of
animals in short periods of time. We have developed a system capable of
automatically detecting, decoding and mapping communication dances in
real-time. In this paper, we describe our recording setup, the image processing
steps performed for dance detection and decoding and an algorithm to map dances
to the field. The proposed system performs with a detection accuracy of
90.07\%. The decoded waggle orientation has an average error of -2.92{\deg}
($\pm$ 7.37{\deg} ), well within the range of human error. To evaluate and
exemplify the system's performance, a group of bees was trained to an
artificial feeder, and all dances in the colony were automatically detected,
decoded and mapped. The system presented here is the first of this kind made
publicly available, including source code and hardware specifications. We hope
this will foster quantitative analyses of the honey bee waggle dance.
