How Honey Bees Communicate

Chemical signals: the blend matters

Much of a honey bee colony’s conversation happens through chemicals called pheromones. A bee releases a signal, and another bee of the same species responds. Sometimes the response comes quickly, perhaps by moving toward the scent. Other signals work more slowly, influencing changes inside the bee’s body, such as the development of her reproductive organs. Researchers call these releaser and primer effects, and the same pheromone system can do both. [2]

The interesting part is that a scent can have several ingredients. One chemical substance is called a compound; several acting together form a blend. Think about the way ingredients contribute to a recipe: knowing what each one is doesn’t tell you everything about the finished result. Some of the queen’s chemicals, for example, attract few workers by themselves but make a much more effective signal when combined with others. [3]

The queen’s chemical signature

Watch a queen on the comb and you may notice a small group of workers gathered around her, touching her with their antennae, licking her, and grooming her. These attendants are called her retinue. Part of what draws them close is a blend of five chemical components produced by glands near the queen’s jaws, known as queen mandibular pheromone.

For a while, that blend seemed to explain much of the attraction. Then Christopher Keeling and his colleagues found four more compounds that added something important to the picture. In their 2003 study, those extra ingredients didn’t attract workers on their own. Added to the original five, though, they brought a stronger response. This is called synergy, where ingredients work together in a way that makes their combination especially effective. [3]

Even with all nine ingredients, the researchers hadn’t quite recreated the queen’s appeal. At higher doses, an extract taken from a queen still attracted workers more strongly than the prepared blend. They had uncovered more of the signal, while leaving an intriguing question: what else were the workers responding to? [3]

More than one way to get a message across

The queen’s influence also reaches beyond the workers gathered around her. Her chemical signals can affect whether workers’ ovaries develop, and here the story takes a different turn. In a 2019 study, several individual compounds or mixtures reduced that development. More than one chemical route could produce a similar result. Scientists call this functional redundancy, a technical name for an idea that’s fairly familiar: there can be more than one way to get a message across. [5]

Put these findings together and the queen’s chemical signature starts to look more layered. Some ingredients strengthen one another, while others have overlapping effects. We still need to understand how those pieces fit together in a hive, especially because drawing workers close and influencing their reproduction are quite different things.

The receiver matters, too

Who receives a signal matters as well. One queen compound, 9-ODA, helps influence reproduction in workers, but it also attracts male bees, or drones, during mating. Researchers exploring that attraction found something interesting: adding two related compounds to a scented queen model didn’t draw more drones from a distance, but it did encourage more of them to make contact with it. The extra ingredients seemed to matter once the drones were close enough for the next step. [5] [12]

Workers: gathering, defense, and changing jobs

A scent to gather around

Imagine trying to find the place where everyone else is gathering. For a worker bee, scent can help point the way. Workers produce a blend called Nasonov pheromone that helps their nestmates orient and come together. Researchers recreated its seven-component mixture in the proportions found in bees and found it could be as attractive as the natural secretion. Add the chemical traces bees leave on surfaces, called footprint pheromone in the study, and the mixture became more attractive still. The bees were responding to more than one clue about the same place. [6]

An alarm with several ingredients

Other scents become important when the colony needs defending. Alarm pheromone associated with the sting helps bring nestmates into the response. One of its best-known ingredients is isoamyl acetate, also called isopentyl acetate, but it belongs to a larger chemical blend. We know that these scents help organize defense; researchers are still working out how detecting them leads a bee to respond. [7]

Knowing when to take on a new job

Some worker signals are involved in a quieter part of colony life: when a bee begins a new job. Isabelle Leoncini and her colleagues studied a compound called ethyl oleate, which foragers produce at higher levels than nurse bees. They found that it can delay the point when younger workers begin foraging. In this way, bees already collecting food can influence when others join them. [8]

It’s a different pace of communication from an alarm that calls for a quick response. These slower signals help shape how work is shared as bees grow older and take on new roles in the colony.

Dances, scent, and vibration work together

Now picture a forager returning from a good food source. Her waggle dance can share information about where she has been, using the comb as a kind of map. On a vertical comb, a waggle run pointing upward means the flight direction is toward the sun. Angle that run to the right, and the direction shifts by the same angle to the right of the sun. The length of time she spends on the waggle run gives information about how far away the destination is.

The bees following her have more to go on than the pattern of her movements. They stay close, sense movement and air vibrations, and may encounter food odors and exchange food. This is where the comparison with our own conversations becomes helpful: several kinds of information arrive together. Researchers have learned a great deal about what the dance conveys, but they are still piecing together how a follower’s brain combines those clues into a journey. [1]

The dance has a scent, too

There’s another part of the dance that we wouldn’t notice just by watching. Corinna Thom and her colleagues found four hydrocarbons, chemicals made of hydrogen and carbon, associated with dancing bees. To find out whether they affected other bees, the team made a mixture of the three compounds available to buy for the experiment. When they introduced it into two study colonies, more bees left the hive than when the researchers used the carrying liquid alone. [9]

That gives us evidence that the scent can encourage foraging activity, though it doesn’t show that scent alone tells a bee where to go. One possibility is that it helps other bees find the dancers. The researchers proposed that explanation, but the experiment didn’t settle exactly how the effect works. It’s another piece of the dance we’re still getting to know.

A signal that puts on the brakes

A colony also needs ways to slow things down. A bee can give a brief vibration, often while pressing her head against another bee, that makes a dancer more likely to stop. This is known as the stop signal. Researchers have observed it in connection with risky foraging experiences and with competing nest-site choices when a swarm is looking for a home. [10]

You can think of it as putting a brake on recruitment to a particular place. The circumstances still matter, though. The name describes what the signal can do, without giving us a word-for-word translation of every exchange between bees.

Drones have signals of their own

Drones often enter the story of bee communication as the males following a queen’s scent. But what about the scents they produce themselves? That side of their lives has received less attention, and researchers are beginning to learn more about what other bees make of those chemicals.

Gabriel Villar and his colleagues explored the question using extracts from glands near drones’ jaws, along with a prepared mixture of six of their main compounds. Both attracted drones outside the hive. Workers tested inside the hive, however, weren’t attracted to either. The finding gives us something to follow up on: when do drones release these chemicals naturally, and what part, if any, do they play at the outdoor gatherings where drones seek mates? [11]

Age adds another part to the story. In a separate laboratory study, sexually mature drones aged 12–15 days moved toward the odor of other drones their own age in a walking test. Younger groups didn’t show the same attraction. The chemicals found on the bees changed with age, too. The instruments recorded 183 chemical peaks in body extracts, which sounds like an enormous vocabulary until we remember what was measured: evidence of chemicals, each of which would need further investigation before being counted as a communication signal. [4]

There is plenty here to be curious about. The next challenge is connecting what happens in these tests with the lives of drones flying freely outside the hive.

The developing bees join in

Even the young bees still developing in their cells have a part in this conversation. Together they’re called brood, and their chemical signals influence the workers around them. Older larvae produce a ten-component blend, known as brood ester pheromone, that works mainly at close range. Young larvae release more E-beta-ocimene in proportion to their body weight. This compound evaporates readily, allowing it to spread through the hive’s air. [2]

When researchers exposed workers to E-beta-ocimene, the bees began foraging earlier. Compare that with ethyl oleate, the worker signal that can delay the start of foraging, and you can see why colony communication is so interesting. Signals come from the young bees needing food as well as the adults already out collecting it. [2] [8]

We can’t yet turn those findings into a simple recipe for how a colony will behave. They do help us picture the hive as a place where information comes from many directions, with even the youngest bees contributing to what happens around them.

What we still don’t know

Finding a chemical message is only part of understanding a conversation. We also need to know how the bee receiving it picks it up and what happens next. Scientists can study a chemical, record a nerve cell’s response, and watch a bee’s behavior. The challenge is joining those observations into an explanation of life inside a busy hive.

Benjamin Andreu and his colleagues approached one part of that puzzle by studying two honey bee odor receptors, proteins involved in detecting scents. Both responded to alarm-pheromone ingredients, but one responded to a narrower range of chemicals than the other. To study them, the team used fruit-fly sensory nerve cells carrying the bee receptors. That helped reveal what the receptors detect; their roles in the behavior of living honey bees are still being investigated. [7]

That’s what makes honey bee communication so rewarding to explore. The more we learn, the more there is to notice: a blend whose ingredients work together, a scent that matters differently as a bee matures, or a dance with a chemical side to its story. Comparing it with our own conversations can help us picture that richness, as long as we remember that we haven’t shown bees choosing chemical “words” the way we choose what to say. Their many small exchanges give us plenty to marvel at, and plenty still to discover.

Explore more about honey bees or continue with beekeeping education.

Research and further reading

If you’d like to follow any of these stories further, these are the papers behind them. The numbered links throughout the page bring you to the matching reference below. Most describe original experiments; the dance and stop-signal reviews bring together work from several studies. Some papers are freely available, while others offer a summary on the publisher’s page and require access to read in full.

1. Ai, H., & Farina, W. M. (2023). In search of behavioral and brain processes involved in honey bee dance communication. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 1140657. Review of the behavior, senses, and brain processes involved in dancing and following.
2. Maisonnasse, A., et al. (2010). E-β-Ocimene, a Volatile Brood Pheromone Involved in Social Regulation in the Honey Bee Colony (Apis mellifera). PLOS ONE, 5(10), e13531. Experiments on larval emissions and the timing of worker foraging.
3. Keeling, C. I., Slessor, K. N., Higo, H. A., & Winston, M. L. (2003). New components of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) queen retinue pheromone. PNAS, 100(8), 4486–4491. Identification and behavioral testing of four additional retinue components. Free full text.
4. Bastin, F., et al. (2017). Age-specific olfactory attraction between Western honey bee drones (Apis mellifera) and its chemical basis. PLOS ONE, 12(10), e0185949. Laboratory attraction tests and age-related chemical profiles.
5. Princen, S. A., et al. (2019). Honeybees possess a structurally diverse and functionally redundant set of queen pheromones. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286, 20190517. Tests of queen compounds and worker ovary development. Free full text.
6. Williams, I. H., Pickett, J. A., & Martin, A. P. (1981). The Nasonov pheromone of the honeybee Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera, Apidae). Part II. Bioassay of the components using foragers. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 7, 225–237. Component testing and enhancement by footprint pheromone.
7. Andreu, B., et al. (2026). Identification of two odorant receptors tuned to alarm pheromone compounds in the honey bee Apis mellifera. Communications Biology, 9, 115. Published online December 23, 2025. Tests of receptor responses, rather than a complete account of bee behavior.
8. Leoncini, I., et al. (2004). Regulation of behavioral maturation by a primer pheromone produced by adult worker honey bees. PNAS, 101(50), 17559–17564. Ethyl oleate and the timing of the transition to foraging. Free full text.
9. Thom, C., Gilley, D. C., Hooper, J., & Esch, H. E. (2007). The Scent of the Waggle Dance. PLOS Biology, 5(9), e228. Four compounds identified; a three-compound mixture tested for its effect on hive departures.
10. Kietzman, P. M., & Visscher, P. K. (2015). The anti-waggle dance: use of the stop signal as negative feedback. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 3, 14. Review of a vibration signal that can reduce recruitment.
11. Villar, G., Wolfson, M. D., Hefetz, A., & Grozinger, C. M. (2018). Evaluating the Role of Drone-Produced Chemical Signals in Mediating Social Interactions in Honey Bees (Apis mellifera). Journal of Chemical Ecology, 44, 1–8. Published online December 6, 2017. Drone-gland extracts and a synthetic six-compound blend tested for attraction.
12. Brockmann, A., Dietz, D., Spaethe, J., & Tautz, J. (2006). Beyond 9-ODA: Sex Pheromone Communication in the European Honey Bee Apis mellifera L. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 32, 657–667. Field tests distinguishing long-range attraction from contact with queen models.