The Honeybee Boogie

While there may be ways we can dance like a bee, the honeybee “waggle dance” is a boogie that bees do themselves!

Honeybees live in hives and have to work together to find food, or pollen and nectar from flowers. It’s important that they find enough food during spring and summer to sustain the hive throughout the colder months, when there aren’t flowers around. This is a huge task for the hive, and one key to their success is communication.

When a worker bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she can communicate this information to other bees by returning to the hive and performing a “waggle dance.” This dance explains the direction and distance of the flower patch.

The bee will first run a straight line while moving the back part of her body back and forth, which is called a “waggle run.” The length of the run indicates the distance to the flower patch. If the waggle run is long, the patch is far away. If the waggle run is short, the patch is close by.

Conveying direction is a little more complicated. Inside the hive, bees can tell what’s up and down by sensing gravity. Outside the hive, the bees orient themselves by looking at the sun. When the bee waggles in a straight line in the hive, she does it in a specific angle away from the up. The bees watching her understand that the patch is located at the same angle away from the sun.

Using the distance and direction information from the waggle dance, other bees can follow the dancing bee’s instructions to find more food for the hive. This is an incredible, complex, and efficient example of communication used by bees!