The waggle dance behaviour is a conserved mechanism in honey bees which is used to transfer information about the spatial location of resources to hive-mates. Studies which have been carried out on the Western honey bees and the tropical species of dwarf and giant honey bees have shown that swarming events in artificial swarms are preceded by waggle dances where the different waggle runs within individual dances show high variation in the distance signalled. These dances with high intra-dance variation in duration have been termed as migratory dances. Earlier studies looking at this behaviour have employed artificially generated swarms where the colonies had no choice but to migrate immediately. We revisit migratory waggle dances by decoding the dances from colonies of the giant honey bee Apis dorsata across two habitats in South India. We show here that migratory dances are not a sufficient indicator of ensuing migration. We conclude that these dances may serve more than one purpose, and are possibly part of a larger response of honey bee colonies towards environmental stress. Moreover, the presence of floral resources all year round, such as in urban green spaces, can potentially delay migration in A. dorsata, making this a flexible response to resource availability.