The dance that tells bees where to fly

A honeybee returns to the hive after finding a rich patch of flowers. She does not simply unload her nectar and fly off again. Instead, on the vertical surface of the honeycomb, in near darkness, she begins to dance. Her sisters crowd around her, follow her movements — and then leave the hive and fly straight to the flowers she found.

A colony that needs information

A western honeybee colony is a big organisation. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, it usually contains around 10,000 to 65,000 female worker bees, along with one queen and, in summer, up to 1,000 male drones. The queen can lay a thousand or more eggs a day. The workers do almost everything else: they build comb, defend the colony and collect food.

Feeding that many mouths takes a lot of foraging. Britannica notes that a strong colony may bring as much as 450 kilograms of nectar, water and pollen into the hive in a year. To do that efficiently, the colony needs to know where the best flowers are right now. That is where the dance comes in.

The round dance and the waggle dance

The meaning of the dance was worked out by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch. In 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen for their discoveries about behaviour.

As the Nobel Prize announcement explains, a bee that has found food close to the hive performs a "round dance" when she returns. It tells her nestmates, in effect: there is food nearby — go and look.

For food sources further away — beyond about 50 metres — the bee performs a different dance: the waggle dance, also called the tail-wagging dance. She runs in a straight line while wagging her abdomen from side to side, then turns back and repeats the run, again and again.

A map in movement

The waggle dance contains two pieces of information.

The first is direction. The direction of the straight, waggling run tells the other bees where the food is, relative to the sun. On the vertical comb, "straight up" stands for the direction of the sun. A run pointing straight up means "fly towards the sun"; a run tilted to the right means "fly that many degrees to the right of the sun".

The second is distance. The waggling itself carries that message. The 1973 Nobel announcement put it in terms of intensity — the more intense the wagging, the closer the food — and bee researchers today describe it through the length of the waggle run: the longer the run, the further away the flowers are.

What happens when clouds hide the sun? Von Frisch showed that bees can still find their bearings by analysing polarised, ultraviolet light in the sky — a pattern invisible to human eyes.

Communication without words

Britannica describes the dance more broadly as dance-like movements that let workers share information about where food is, how far away it is, and how much there is and of what quality. It is a remarkable kind of communication: a symbolic message, performed in the dark, that points to a place the other bees have never seen.

More than honey

When honeybees collect nectar and pollen, they also pollinate the flowers they visit. That matters far beyond the hive. Britannica reports that in the United States alone, the pollination services of western honeybees contribute more than 15 billion dollars' worth of crops each year.

Why it matters

A honeybee colony works because its members share what they learn. The waggle dance turns one bee’s discovery into the whole colony’s knowledge. Every time you see honeybees working a flowering tree, there is a good chance they were sent there by a dance.