What is the Bee waggle dance?

What is the Bee waggle dance? 

The bee waggle dance was first decoded in the 1960s by the Austrian Nobel prize winning ethologist Karl von Frisch.51 He christened this unique bee language ‘Tanzsprache’ and undoubtedly it’s one of the wonders of the insect world and what helps to make bees so successful as a social species. In general terms, it works rather like a news grapevine, allowing foragers to share with sister bees information about the direction and distance to food sources or potential new homes. So what’s involved? Rather like 1980s break-dancers on the street, bees perform the waggle dance in front of any other bees who’ll stop and watch. Dancing bees move in a figure-of-eight pattern comprising a ‘waggle run’ followed by a turn to the right to take them back to the starting spot, then

another waggle run followed by a turn to the left, again returning them to the starting point. Most dances last for 100 such circuits and are accompanied by a waft of chemical signals from the dancer’s abdomen to make other workers pay attention. The direction of the waggle run indicates the direction other bees should fly in, relative to the position of the sun, and the distance is communicated by the duration of the waggle phase of the dance: every 75 milliseconds of dance duration translates into a flight of 100 metres. The bees can also take into account the passage of time and use their body clocks to predict the movement of the sun across the sky to avoid becoming disorientated. But not all bee observers are quick on the uptake: some are too stubborn to be told, others will cotton on after watching just a few dances, some need a bit more nurturing, while others fly off in a totally different direction despite their education. Pretty similar to humans, really!