This paper looked at how honey bees pass on food-location information through the waggle dance, and found that these recruitment networks are actually quite thin rather than densely connected. In other words, even though the dance is famous, each bee usually ends up recruiting only a small number of other bees rather than spreading the message widely through the whole colony.
It also found that individual differences between bees matter: some bees are simply better at dancing in a way that successfully recruits others. In plain terms, the colony’s communication system depends not just on the dance itself, but on the particular style and effectiveness of individual bees.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/bee-science/articles/10.3389/frbee.2025.1654032
