The waggle dance of the honey bee is used to recruit nest mates to a resource, though direction indicated for a resource may vary greatly within a single dance. Some authors suggest that this variation exits as an adaptation to distribute recruits across a patch of flowers, and that, due to the variation’s inverse relationship with distance, the shape of the recruit distribution will remain constant for resources at different distances. In this study, we test this hypothesis by examining how variation in the indication of direction and distance changes with respect to distance. We find that imprecision in the communication of direction does not diminish rapidly enough to accommodate an adaptive-error hypothesis, and we also find that variation in the indication of distance has a positive relationship with the distance of a resource from the hive.

中文翻译：

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调整误差假设预测的摇摆舞拟合模式的不精确性？

蜜蜂的摇摆舞用于为资源招募巢伴，尽管在单个舞蹈中为资源指示的方向可能会有很大差异。一些作者认为，这种变化是作为对在一片花丛中分配新兵的一种适应而存在的，并且由于变异与距离的反比关系，新兵分布的形状对于不同距离的资源将保持不变。在这项研究中，我们通过检查方向和距离指示的变化如何随距离变化来检验这一假设。我们发现方向通信的不精确性没有迅速减少以适应自适应误差假设，并且我们还发现距离指示的变化与资源与蜂巢的距离呈正相关。