Building a linguistic corpus from bee dance data

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of creating a linguistic corpus from bee dance data and uses linguistic tools to analyze whether the dances convey meaningful information, building on historical studies of non-human communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to analyzing bee dances as linguistic data using corpus methods and statistical tools like Zipf's law and entropy.

Findings

Bee dance data can be structured into a linguistic corpus.

Linguistic tools can assess information content in non-human communication.

Historical context informs the analysis of animal communication systems.

Abstract

This paper discusses the problems and possibility of collecting bee dance data in a linguistic \textit{corpus} and use linguistic instruments such as Zipf's law and entropy statistics to decide on the question whether the dance carries information of any kind. We describe this against the historical background of attempts to analyse non-human communication systems.