Waggle dance

Definition

The bee runs in a straight line while vibrating her abdomen, then loops back and repeats. The angle of the straight run relative to vertical on the comb encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun; the duration of the waggle encodes the distance. Karl von Frisch worked this out in the mid-twentieth century and received a Nobel Prize for it. Later work has refined how much recruits actually extract from it — many follow the dance and then search using odour as well — but the encoding itself is not in doubt.

Bee records that discuss this

• Western honey beeThe bee behind essentially all the world's honey, and the one most people mean when they say 'bee'. Apis mellifera is a perennial eusocial insect that overwinters as a living cluster rather than dying back each year — which is the whole reason it stores honey in quantity, and therefore the reason it was ever domesticated. It is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia and has been carried by people to every continent except Antarctica.
• Stingless beesThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
• Dwarf honey beeThe smallest honey bee, and the one that does its waggle dance the right way up. Apis florea builds a single small comb wrapped around a twig in a bush, and because the top of that comb forms a horizontal platform, the dancing bee points directly at the food source rather than translating the direction into an angle against gravity. It is the simplest form of the dance language and probably the ancestral one.
• Tetragonula beesThe small stingless bees of Asia and Australia, and the genus behind both the Malaysian kelulut industry and Australian sugarbag honey. They are tiny — often three or four millimetres — and they build spiral brood combs and elaborate resin nest entrances that are frequently the easiest way to find them.

Guide records that discuss this

• How bees communicate and find their wayThe waggle dance encodes direction and distance in a figure of eight. It is one of the most sophisticated communication systems outside human language, and it is only part of how a colony makes decisions.
• How far do bees travel to forage?A honey bee will fly ten kilometres if she has to and would much rather fly one. A solitary bee may not manage three hundred metres. That gap decides what 'planting for bees' actually means.
• The waggle danceTwo numbers, encoded in the geometry of a run across a dark comb: which way, and how far. It took decades to decode, was seriously disputed for another twenty years, and was settled by tracking individual recruits with radar.
• The signals inside a colonyThe waggle dance is the famous one and it is not the important one. A colony runs on a repertoire of vibratory pulses, brief contacts and chemical messages, several of which do more work in an ordinary day than the dance does in a season.

Question records that discuss this

• Why do bees dance?To give directions. A returning honey bee forager performs a figure-of-eight run on the vertical comb in which the angle of the straight portion encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun, and its duration encodes the distance. Von Frisch called it a dance language, and the encoding is genuinely symbolic — a solar bearing represented as an angle from vertical on a dark comb. It has not been shown to be compositional or referential beyond that, which is what the word language usually implies.
• What do bees use their antennae for?Almost everything. A bee's antennae carry its sense of smell, contact taste, touch, temperature, humidity and the detection of air movement and vibration. Johnston's organ in the second segment is how a follower reads a waggle dance in a completely dark hive — by feeling it rather than by hearing or seeing it.
• Can bees hear?Not in the way we do. Bees have no ears and do not respond to sound-pressure waves the way a vertebrate ear does. They detect the movement of air particles very close to a source, and vibration transmitted through a surface, using Johnston's organ in the antennae — which is enough to read a waggle dance in the dark.
• What information does the waggle dance encode?Two things: direction, as the angle of the straight run away from vertical, which equals the angle of the target away from the sun's bearing; and distance, as the duration of the waggling portion. Dance vigour adds a third piece of information — how good the source is — which is how the colony weighs one patch against another.