BEIJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- It turns out honey bees are a lot like people: they put on a better show when they know someone is watching.

A new study by Chinese scientists has found that the famous waggle dance of honey bees -- a time-honored way of telling nestmates where to find food -- is not a one-way announcement but a lively two-way conversation shaped by the audience. When no one is paying attention, the dancers get sloppy.

The research, led by scientists from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

For decades, scientists thought the waggle dance was simply a signal broadcast by a worker bee to passive followers. A dancer wiggles its body in a figure-eight pattern, encoding the direction and distance to a food source. The audience watches, then flies off to find the meal.

But the new study suggests there's more going on. The dancers, it turns out, are keeping an eye on their audience.

To find out whether bees change their dance depending on who's watching, the researchers set up two experiments. In one, they removed some of the older, experienced bees from the hive -- the ones most likely to follow dances -- leaving fewer potential followers. In another, they added a bunch of very young bees that were not yet mature enough to understand the dance, while keeping the overall population the same. Then they watched to see how the dancers would react.

The results were striking.

When fewer suitable followers were around, the dancers put in less effort. They performed fewer dance circuits and were less precise when encoding direction and distance. They also spent more time wandering around the honeycomb during the return run of their dance, as if searching for someone to recruit.

"Dancers with fewer followers performed fewer dance circuits and encoded direction and distance less precisely," said Dong Shihao, a researcher from the XTBG. "They appeared to be actively seeking an audience."

The researchers believe all that extra wandering may actually mess with the dancer's ability to send a clear message. The more they move and interrupt themselves, the harder it becomes to keep the steady, precise motions needed for accurate communication.

The study is the first to show that the information in the waggle dance is shaped by feedback from the audience -- an "audience effect" that has been largely overlooked in animal communication research, Dong said.

"The waggle dance is not just the sender broadcasting a message; it's a two-way interaction," said Tan Ken, a researcher from the XTBG. "The signal itself is shaped by the receivers, demonstrating a bidirectional information flow." ■