The Waggle Dance

Bees live in an environment that is constantly changing. Any patch of flowers is always at risk of wilting, being plundered by another hive, or being destroyed by bad weather. Depending on the length and severity of a region's winters, a colony needs to have stockpiled between 20 and 35 kg of honey by the time the weather turns cold. So when a foraging honeybee finds a good source of nectar, it is important to communicate the source's location to the other bees in her hive. Honeybees communicate the distance, direction, and quality of nectar sources with a series of movements known as a “waggle dance”.

The waggle dance consists of one set of motions that is varied in specific ways to convey information to the other bees. When a bee returns from foraging to tell her hivemates about a patch of lavender she found, she crawls into the hive and lands on the vertical wall to begin her dance. The general pattern of the dance is always the same:

1. She crawls up the wall, wiggling as she goes

2. She loops back down and to the right

3. She wiggles back up the wall

4. She loops down and to the left

A video of the waggle dance can be found here.

She will repeat this pattern over and over. The nuances of the dance communicate the direction, distance, and quality of the food source she found.

The amount of time she spends repeating the dance depends on the quality of the food source she found- a bee who has found a source of high quality nectar will dance for a long time, while a lower quality nectar source may merit only a few repetitions. She is dancing for other forager bees that are milling around inside the hive; the longer she dances, the more of them will see her dance and be “recruited” to her nectar source. 

 

In addition to communicating nectar quality, the bee needs to give her hivemates directions to the nectar. Honeybees communicate distance in the wiggling part of the dance, called the waggle run. The longer they spend waggling, the farther away the nectar source is. 

 

 The third piece of information that the bee gives her hivemates is what direction to fly. The direction is coded into the angle of her waggle dance. On the vertical wall of the hive, the waggling portion of the dance is done at some angle to the vertical.

If another bee in the hive decides to visit the flower patch she is dancing about, it will translate this angle into a direction to travel. The recruited bee goes outside of the hive and looks for the sun:

There is a point on the horizon that is directly beneath the sun (shown as a red dot). The recruited bee considers an imaginary line from the hive to this point, and makes this her reference line. If the dancing bee did her waggle dance at an angle of 30° clockwise from the vertical, then the recruited bee will travel in a direction 30° clockwise from the reference line.

 

In addition to the directions given in the waggle dance, recruited bees also depend on the scent of the flower patch. When the dancing bee enters the hive with the nectar she just collected, the scent of the flowers is still on her, and recruited bees will remember that scent as they approach the location the dance told them to go to. A colony usually ranges over an area between 28 and 78 square miles, so although the waggle dance is impressively precise, scents help recruited bees find the flower patch once they have reached the correct general area.