What is the round dance?
Short answerMostly false
It is not a separate dance. What older textbooks call the round dance is the short-distance end of one continuous form: when a food source is very close, the waggle run becomes so brief that the figure-of-eight collapses into a loop and directional information effectively disappears. There is one dance, not two.
Where the belief comes from
Von Frisch's early descriptions distinguished a round dance for near sources from a waggle dance for far ones, and generations of textbooks and school material repeated the two-dance framing. Later analysis showed the transition is gradual and the two are the same behaviour at different distances.
What actually changes with distance
As the source gets closer, the waggle portion shortens. Below roughly fifty to a hundred metres — the threshold varies between subspecies — it is too brief to encode a usable direction, and the dancer's path traces circles rather than a clear figure of eight. Followers get the message that something good is nearby and search for it.
Why the correction matters
Sources
- The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees — Harvard University Press (1967) · Monograph
- Honeybee Democracy — Princeton University Press (2010) · Monograph
- The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.