SUMMARYThis work focuses on the responses of dancing bees to uncertain rewards. We varied the distribution of a fixed amount of sugar solution among the several flowers of a patch and recorded the foraging and subsequent dance behaviour of single honeybees collecting such a reward at that patch. Concurrently, we aimed to minimize the well-known modulatory effects of sugar reward on both the probability and the strength of a honeybeeʼs dance. It was under these circumstances that we conceived the honeybee dance as an autonomous information-processing system and asked whether or not such a system is sensitive to uncertainty of reward. Our results suggest that bees can tune their dancing according to the distribution of sugar reward among the several flowers of a patch, and that they seemingly do this based on the number -or the frequency -of their non-rewarding inspections to these flowers: the higher the number of non-rewarding inspections the lower the probability of dancing. As a result, a honeybeeʼs dance appears as ʻrisk-averseʼ, meaning that dances for uncertain resources are less likely. Presumably, the ultimate result of having ʻrisk-averseʼ dances is a colonyʼs ability to diminish delayed rewards and the effects of competition with other flower visitors for limited resources. We conclude that a systems approach to the honeybee dance will help to further analyse the regulation of a honeybeeʼs threshold for dancing, and that theoretical accounts of ʻrisk-sensitiveʼ dances would prove fruitful in broader studies of honeybee foraging, particularly if one were to examine how recruitment actually translates into fitness.