How Do Bees Communicate? The Waggle Dance Explained
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A foraging honeybee that has found a good patch of flowers flies home and, in the dark of the hive, walks a figure of eight on the comb while shaking her body. Within minutes other bees leave the hive and fly to the same patch, though they have never seen it. The dance is a map, the only known case outside human language of an animal describing a place it is not at, and working out how it does that won a Nobel Prize.
A code in a figure of eight
The dance has two parts. The bee runs in a straight line, waggling her abdomen from side to side and buzzing her wings, then circles back to the start, runs the line again, and circles back the other way, tracing a figure of eight. The straight waggle run is the message. Its direction and its duration carry the two numbers a bee needs.
Distance is in the length of the run. A waggle run lasting about a second means the flowers are roughly a kilometre away; longer runs mean further, and the bees seem to measure distance not in metres but in how much the landscape streamed past their eyes on the way home, so a route over open water reads as shorter than the same distance over cluttered ground. Very close food, within about fifty metres, gets a simpler round dance with no waggle at all.
Pointing at the Sun in the dark
Direction is the clever part. The comb hangs vertically and the hive is dark, so the bee cannot point at the flowers. Instead she uses gravity as a stand-in for the Sun. A waggle run straight up the comb means fly towards the Sun; straight down means fly away from it; a run angled 40 degrees to the right of vertical means fly 40 degrees to the right of the Sun. The bees watching her follow closely, touching her with their antennae to read the angle and feel the vibration.
The Sun moves, and the dance moves with it. A bee dancing for an hour about the same flowers slowly rotates her angle to keep pace, and a bee that learned the direction in the morning can still find the patch in the afternoon by correcting for the Sun's movement in her own head. On overcast days they use the pattern of polarised light in the sky, which their eyes can see and ours cannot.
How the code was cracked
Karl von Frisch, an Austrian zoologist, spent decades from the 1920s watching marked bees in glass-walled hives and moving dishes of sugar water around meadows. He noticed that recruited bees arrived at the right distance and bearing even when the dish was hidden, and by changing the dish's position and reading the dances he decoded the relationship between angle, duration and location. He published the full account in 1946 and shared the Nobel Prize in 1973.
Not everyone believed it. Critics argued for years that recruits simply followed the scent of the flowers on the dancer's body, and it took experiments with harmonic radar published in 2005, tracking individual bees with tiny transponders, to show that recruits fly the dance's vector even when it leads them to a place with nothing to smell. Scent does matter, but as confirmation once they arrive, not as the map.
Arguing about where to live
The dance is also how a swarm chooses a new home. When a colony divides, thousands of bees hang in a cluster on a branch while a few hundred scouts search for cavities. Each scout returns and dances for the site she found, and the vigour and duration of her dance reflect its quality. Other scouts go to inspect the sites being danced for, and if they agree they dance too.
Over a day or two the dances for the poorer sites die away and support piles onto the best one, until enough scouts are at that cavity for the swarm to take off and move in. Thomas Seeley, who spent years watching this on an island off Maine, showed that the process reliably picks the best available site and described it as a decision made by a crowd with no leader, which has since been borrowed as a model for how groups of people, and groups of robots, might choose well.
What else bees say
The dance is the most famous signal but not the only one. A bee that has met danger at a flower, a spider or a fellow bee dying there, will head-butt a dancer to stop her recruiting for that site. A short vibrating stop signal does the same when the hive already has more foragers than the flowers can use. Pheromones carry most of the rest: the queen's scent tells the colony she is alive and well, an alarm pheromone released at a sting summons defenders, and a pheromone from the hive entrance guides returning foragers in. The signals a hive runs on:
- •Waggle dance: direction and distance of food, water or a new home
- •Round dance: food very close by, no direction given
- •Stop signal and head-butt: that site is dangerous or overcrowded
- •Queen pheromone: the colony is intact and has a laying queen
- •Alarm pheromone: attack here, released with a sting
Dialects and other dancers
The waggle dance is not quite the same in every honeybee. Von Frisch noticed that different subspecies convert distance into waggle time at different rates, so that a run of a given length means a shorter flight to a bee from one population than to a bee from another, and he called these differences dialects. Later work has found that the calibration also shifts with the landscape a colony forages over, which fits the idea that bees measure distance by the scenery flowing past rather than by any fixed yardstick.
Other species of honeybee show how the dance may have evolved. The dwarf honeybee of southern Asia builds a single comb in the open and dances on its flat top in daylight, where the dancer can point her waggle run straight at the food and needs no gravity code at all. Honeybees that nest in dark cavities, like the familiar Western honeybee, dance on vertical comb and must translate. Bumblebees and most other bees have no dance; a returning forager simply runs excitedly around the nest and spreads the scent of the flowers she found.
Reading the dances to map a landscape
Because a waggle dance encodes a real place, people can read it too. Researchers film the dancers in glass-sided observation hives, measure the angle and duration of each waggle run frame by frame, and convert them back into a bearing and a distance from the hive. Doing this for thousands of dances across a season produces a map of where a colony is actually foraging, without anyone having to follow a single bee across the countryside. Studies in Britain have used this method to see which kinds of land bees rely on in different months and whether wildflower margins and similar schemes are really being used.
The method has to cope with the fact that dances are noisy. Successive waggle runs by the same bee vary a little in angle and length, so a follower does not take her bearing from one run but attends to several, and researchers likewise average a dancer's runs before plotting a point. Even then the message is approximate. Recruits often need more than one attempt before they find the patch, searching the right general area and then homing in on the scent and colour of the flowers, which is why the dance and the smell of the forage work together.
Reading one dance, and the experiments behind the code
Here is how a single dance translates. Suppose that at mid-morning a bee's waggle runs point 60 degrees to the left of straight up the comb and each lasts about two seconds. Straight up means towards the Sun, which at that hour in the northern hemisphere lies roughly south-east. Facing south-east, your left is north-east, so turning 60 degrees that way gives a bearing about 15 degrees north of due east. The two-second runs, on the rough rule that a second stands for about a kilometre, put the patch around two kilometres away, though the exact conversion varies between colonies.
Von Frisch tested the gravity code by changing what the dancers could sense. When he laid a comb flat and let the bees see the sky, they abandoned the up-and-down convention and pointed their waggle runs straight at the food. On a flat comb in darkness, with neither a slope nor the sky to refer to, the dances lost their direction altogether. And when a light was shone into a dark hive with upright comb, dancers shifted their angles as though the lamp were the Sun. Together these results showed that the gravity rule is a substitute the bees fall back on only when the Sun cannot be seen.
Young bees learn the dance by watching
The dance has long been treated as pure instinct, wired into every worker. A study published in 2023 by researchers in China and the United States tested that by setting up colonies in which young bees could not watch older ones dance before they began foraging. When those bees made their first dances, the mistakes were much larger than normal: their waggle runs pointed in more scattered directions, their figures of eight were more disorderly, and the distances they signalled were off. Bees of the same age raised in normal colonies, which had followed experienced dancers, produced far tidier dances from the start.
With practice the untaught bees improved, and their directions and orderliness moved closer to normal, presumably as they learned from their own flights and from following other dancers. Their coding of distance, though, stayed different for as long as they were studied, as if that part of the code is best picked up early. The pattern resembles the way young songbirds learn their songs by listening to adults during a sensitive period. It suggests that even this textbook example of instinct depends partly on social learning, and that a honeybee colony passes on to its young more than its genes.
The takeaway
Honeybees tell each other where food is with a waggle dance in which the angle of the run stands for the direction relative to the Sun and its duration for the distance. Decoded by Karl von Frisch and confirmed by radar tracking, the same dance lets a swarm vote on a new home, and it sits alongside a set of pheromones and stop signals that run the rest of the hive.