The honeybee waggle dance communication system is an intriguing example of
abstract animal communication and has been investigated thoroughly throughout
the last seven decades. Typically, observables such as waggle durations or
body angles are extracted manually either directly from the observation hive
or from video recordings to quantify properties of the dance and related
behaviors. In recent years, biology has profited from automation, improving
measurement precision, removing human bias, and accelerating data collection.
We have developed technologies to track all individuals of a honeybee colony
and to detect and decode communication dances automatically. In strong
contrast to conventional approaches that focus on a small subset of the hive
life, whether this regards time, space, or animal identity, our more inclusive
system will help the understanding of the dance comprehensively in its
spatial, temporal, and social context. In this contribution, we present full
specifications of the recording setup and the software for automatic
recognition of individually tagged bees and the decoding of dances. We discuss
potential research directions that may benefit from the proposed automation.
Lastly, to exemplify the power of the methodology, we show experimental data
and respective analyses from a continuous, experimental recording of 9 weeks
duration