The Grooming Invitation Dance of the Honey Bee

The grooming invitation dance is a striking behavior in honey bee colonies that has not been extensively studied. The objectives of this study were (1) to describe the dance through video analysis, (2) to test the functional hypothesis that it is a grooming solicitation signal, and (3) to analyze the stimuli that cause its production. A worker bee producing the grooming invitation dance stands stationary and vibrates her whole body from side‐to‐side at a frequency of 4.2 ± 0.2 Hz for 9.3 ± 1.0 s. Sometimes the bee mixes bouts of body vibration with brief bouts of self‐grooming (average duration = 1.4 s). Bees that perform the grooming invitation dance have a far higher probability of being quickly groomed by a nest mate than do bees that do not perform the dance. Bees that had chalk dust puffed onto the bases of their wings produced significantly more grooming invitation dances than did control bees that received only puffs of air. This shows that it may be the accumulation of small particles at the bases of the wings that normally triggers the dance. We suggest that the evolutionary origin of this signal is self‐grooming behavior.