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Bee basics · 3 of 6

The waggle dance

A forager who has found good flowers comes home and dances a map of where they are, using the sun as her compass.

When a forager finds a rich patch of flowers, she doesn't keep it to herself. Back in the dark hive, on the vertical face of the comb, she performs a dance that tells her sisters which direction to fly and how far to go. The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch worked out what the dance means, and shared a Nobel Prize for it in 1973.

Direction: the angle to the sun

The dance is a figure of eight. In the middle of the eight the bee runs straight while waggling her body from side to side. That waggle run is the message.

On the comb, straight up stands for the direction of the sun. The angle of the waggle run away from straight up is the angle of the flowers away from the sun.

Reading a waggle dance Left: on the comb, a bee's waggle run points 40 degrees to the right of straight up. Right: outside, the flowers are 40 degrees to the right of the sun, as seen from the hive. ON THE COMB straight up = sun 40° waggle run, 40° right of up (dotted: the return loops)

OUTSIDE sun flowers 40° hive

A waggle run 40° right of straight up means "fly 40° to the right of the sun".

So a dance pointing straight up means "fly towards the sun". Straight down means "fly away from it", and 90° to the left means "keep the sun on your right". As the sun moves across the sky during the day, the dancers change their angle to match. They keep track of the time without a clock.

Distance: the length of the waggle

The longer the waggle run lasts, the further away the flowers are. As a rough guide, each second of waggling means something like a kilometre of flight, though every colony's "dialect" is a little different. Bees actually measure distance by how much of the world streams past their eyes on the way, not by the energy they use.

For flowers very close to the hive, within a few tens of metres, the bee does a simpler round dance. It says "it's close, go and look" without giving a direction.

Quality: how hard she dances

A bee that has found a really good patch, with sweet nectar close to home, dances for longer and with more circuits, and recruits more followers. A poorer patch gets a short, half-hearted dance, or none at all. The followers also taste samples of nectar from the dancer and smell the flowers on her. In this way the colony shifts its workforce to the best flowers within hours, with no one in charge.

Watch the dances

In Hive Mind, the dance floor in the hive panel shows the real dances for the flowers the colony is working, at the right angle for the sun at that moment. Click any patch of flowers on the map to see its distance, bearing and the dance that points to it.