How honeybees share directions
A honeybee that finds a good patch of flowers faces a problem. The food may be a kilometre or more from the hive, and the bee cannot draw a map. Yet within minutes, dozens of her sisters can fly straight to the same flowers. For centuries, beekeepers saw this happen without knowing how the message was passed on.
The answer came from the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who spent decades watching bees in glass-walled hives. He noticed that a returning forager often performed a short, repeated movement on the vertical wall of the comb. She ran forward in a straight line while shaking her body from side to side, then looped back to the start and ran again. Von Frisch called this the waggle dance, and in 1973 he shared a Nobel Prize for his work on animal behaviour.
The dance works like a set of directions. The angle of the straight run, measured from straight up, matches the angle between the sun and the food source. If a bee runs directly upwards, the flowers lie in the direction of the sun. If she runs to the right of vertical, the food is the same angle to the right of the sun. The length of the waggle carries the second piece of information: the longer the bee waggles on each run, the farther away the food is.
Other foragers crowd around the dancer, following her movements in the dark of the hive by touch. Then they leave and fly out on the bearing they have learned.
The system has some clever details. The sun moves across the sky during the day, so bees adjust the angle of their dance to keep the directions accurate. And on cloudy days, they can still find the sun’s position from the pattern of polarised light in patches of blue sky, which human eyes cannot see.
Not every dance leads to a good meal. But by sharing what they find, a colony of tens of thousands of bees can gather food far more efficiently than any single bee could alone.