The bees that ignore the dance

In this blog we explain why the truth about bees and their famous waggle dance is important, and links this to why a fifth of your fundraising should be looking for markets or approaches — especially decision science — you maybe haven’t tried yet.

You probably know the waggle dance story. A honeybee finds a good patch of flowers. She flies home and dances on the comb. The angle of the dance gives the direction. Its duration gives the distance. The colony reads the message and pours its foragers into the proven source.

It is a lovely story. It gets used in our sector as an argument for focus, evidence and doing more of what already works.

It is also only about two-thirds of the truth.

A fifth of the colony goes its own way

Not every forager follows the dance. A sizeable minority ignore it and fly off to search alone. Thomas Seeley‘s work (see below) puts the scout share at somewhere between 5% and 35% of a colony’s foragers, rising and falling with what the colony needs and what is flowering outside. On an ordinary day, call it a fifth.

These bees are not lost, not stupid and they are not slacking. Various studies found scouts differ from other foragers in the expression of genes governing dopamine, glutamate and GABA signalling. That’s the same chemistry that sits behind novelty-seeking in humans. Feed non-scouts glutamate and scouting goes up. Block it and scouting falls away. Bees that scout for nest sites are more than three times as likely to scout for food later on. The colony grows its explorers on purpose.

Often what those explorers find is worthless. That’s the point.

Why the colony pays for failure

A flower patch is a depleting asset. It is at its richest on the day it is discovered and worth slightly less every day after. Weather shuts it down. Something else eats it. It simply stops flowering.

A colony with every forager committed to today’s best patch looks wonderfully efficient. It stays efficient right up to the morning the patch is gone. Then it has no idea where to go next, and it starts searching from cold with time ticking before internal resources run out.

The 20% is not waste. The colony is buying a map of next season while this season still pays for it.

The dance is noisier than we admit

Three findings are worth sitting with.

Recent network analysis of recruitment inside hives shows that most dance-following does not do what we assume. Between 75% and 88% of dance-following interactions simply reactivate a bee to a site she already knew about. They do not send her anywhere new.

Of the bees that do set out for the advertised patch, 60% to 80% never find it.

And Seeley and Towne showed that bees do not compare competing dances to pick the best patch on offer. Recruits distribute themselves across sources roughly in proportion to how much dancing each source attracts. Popularity is the key guide, not merit.

So the celebrated mechanism is repetitive, not really based on results and is simply poor at optimising. The colony thrives if it spreads its bets and keeps a fifth of its workforce outside the ‘follow me’ dancing system altogether.

Your programme is mostly dance-following

OK — if you’ve read this far you’re probably interested in science and what it can tell us. Now look at your own fundraising plan for next year.

Most fundraising strategies I read are dances. They point every available forager at the patch that paid last year. The same trust list. The same warm legacy audience. The same three channels. The same event, its eleventh outing, with a new colour scheme.

Each of those decisions is defensible on its own. Together they commit 100% of your capacity to markets that are, by definition, already being harvested — by you and by everyone else who read the same benchmarking report.

And your patches are depleting too. Your legacy pipeline reflects an age profile that will not renew itself. Your best-performing channel costs more to reach every year. Your major donors are getting older and your acquisition is not replacing them at the top. None of that is a crisis this quarter. All of it is a crisis in five years if nobody is out scouting.

How to run a scout programme

• Fund it as a fixed share, not a leftover. Ring-fence a set percentage of budget and staff time — 10% is a serious start, 20% is the bee number. Leftover money never gets spent on exploration, because there is never any leftover money.
• Judge scouts on information, not income. A test that returns nothing but a clear answer has done its job. Measure whether you learned something you can act on. Hold the income conversation for the second round.
• Design tests you can actually read. One variable. A sample big enough to mean something. A result defined before you start. Most “we tried that once” stories in our sector are stories about badly designed tests.
• Set a kill rule in advance. Agree the number at which you stop. Scouts that never come home are a cost, not a virtue.
• Then dance. The moment something works, tell the whole colony. Move resource fast and loudly. Exploration only pays if exploitation follows.

The ask

Ask yourself, your boss or even your board this question. What proportion of next year’s fundraising budget is committed to approaches or markets you have never tested?

If the answer is nought, you have a beautifully efficient colony working a patch that is quietly running out.

Sources

• Seeley, T.D. (1983) — scouts make up 5–35% of a colony’s foragers, depending on need.
• Liang, Z.S. et al. (2012), Science — “Molecular Determinants of Scouting Behavior in Honey Bees”.
• Seeley, T.D. and Towne, W.F. (1992), Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology — bees do not compare dances before choosing a source.
• Frontiers in Bee Science (2025) — “Dancing on the edge: honey bee recruitment networks are sparse and affected by individuality in waggle dance behavior”.