When a honeybee finds a good patch of flowers, it can't just point — the hive is pitch dark inside. So it dances. On the wall of the comb it runs in a little figure-eight, and in the middle it waggles its body in a straight line. That straight waggle is the secret message: the way it leans tells the other bees which direction to fly, measured from where the sun is. And the longer the bee waggles, the farther away the flowers are. The other bees crowd around, feel the dance in the dark, and head straight out. Open the simulator, place a flower, and watch the bee turn its trip into a dance.
Most people think a returning bee leads the others out or leaves a scent trail to follow. In fact the information is handed over inside the dark hive before anyone takes off, encoded as the angle and length of a waggle run.
What's actually happening
The obvious guess is that a returning bee somehow leads the others out, or leaves a scent trail to follow. Neither is the main story. The hive is dark and crowded, the flowers may be a kilometre off, and yet bees that have never left the hive fly almost straight to the patch. The information is being handed over inside the hive, before anyone takes off — and it is handed over as a dance.
The dancer runs a tight figure-eight on the vertical wall of the comb, and the part that matters is the straight stretch through the middle, where it waggles its abdomen hard. The angle of that waggle run, measured from straight up, is the direction to the food measured from the sun. If the flowers lie 40° to the right of the sun, the bee waggles 40° to the right of vertical. It has taken a direction in the sky and rewritten it against gravity, in the dark. The other half of the message is in the timing: the longer the waggle lasts, the farther the food, at something close to a second of waggling per kilometre. Karl von Frisch worked all this out in the 1940s by painting numbers on bees and watching for hours, and it won him a share of a Nobel Prize.
What makes it almost unbelievable is that the bees keep the map honest as the day rolls on. The sun moves across the sky, so a direction given as 'to the right of the sun' would go stale within minutes. Dancing bees compensate, slowly rotating the angle of their waggle to account for how far the sun has travelled since they last saw it — even continuing to adjust while dancing inside, where they cannot see the sun at all. A scout that found a feeder at noon will, by mid-afternoon, be pointing its hive-mates at a visibly different angle for the very same flowers.
A bee turns a direction in the sky into an angle against gravity, so a dance in the dark becomes a precise map to food.
- 1Stand in a room and pick a window as "the sun". Choose a hidden treat somewhere off to one side of that window.
- 2Now face a blank wall and, keeping the window-direction in mind, point your arm at the same angle off straight-up that the treat sits off the window — that swap from "off the sun" to "off vertical" is exactly the bee's trick.
- 3Have a friend read your arm angle and walk it back out to the real treat. The longer you would "waggle", the farther you are telling them to go.
Common questions
The duration of the straight waggle run encodes how far the food is, at roughly one second of waggling per kilometre. The longer the bee waggles, the farther the recruits fly.
They do not see it at all. Recruits crowd around the dancer and follow the dance by touch in the pitch-black hive, reading the angle and timing through contact.
Yes. Because the dance gives direction relative to the sun, dancing bees slowly rotate their waggle angle to compensate for how far the sun has travelled, even while dancing indoors where they cannot see it.