Honeybees Give Each Other Directions by Dancing

A honeybee comes home from a garden full of lavender, her legs dusted with pollen. She does not go quietly to unload. Instead she climbs onto the wall of honeycomb inside the hive and starts to dance, and a little crowd of her sisters gathers round to watch, or rather to feel, because it is far too dark in there to see anything at all.

The dance is a figure of eight. The bee runs forward in a straight line, shaking her body rapidly from side to side, then loops round to the start, runs the straight line again, then loops round the other way. The straight, shaking part is called the waggle run, and it holds a map. Its direction tells the others which way to fly, and its length tells them how far.

Direction comes from the sun. The comb hangs vertically, so the dancer uses straight up to stand for the direction of the sun outside. If the flowers lie directly towards the sun, she waggles straight up. If they lie directly away from it, she waggles straight down. If they are forty degrees to the left of the sun, the waggle run tilts forty degrees to the left of vertical. She is turning an angle in the sky into an angle against gravity, on a wall, in the dark.

Distance comes from time. The longer the waggle run lasts, the farther away the food. A waggle run of about two and a half seconds points to flowers roughly 2,600 metres from the hive. For food very close by, less than about 50 metres away, bees use a simpler round dance instead, running in small circles and suddenly reversing, which says that good things are near without giving any direction.

The details get stranger the closer you look. The sun moves across the sky during the day, so the same patch of flowers due east is danced almost straight up in the morning and almost straight down in the late afternoon, and bees that have been inside the hive for a long time adjust their angle to match. Different kinds of honeybee even have their own dialects, with dances that vary in their curves and timing, and in mixed colonies the bees have gradually learned to read each other's version.

How do the watchers follow a dance they cannot see? The dancer's wings buzz as she waggles, and her sisters pick up the vibrations and sounds as they press close and follow her every move. The dance gets the new recruits to the right general area, and once they are there, the smell of the flowers leads them to the exact patch.

People noticed the pattern long before they understood it. More than two thousand years ago, a Greek naturalist wrote that a bee returning to the hive seemed to be followed by three or four companions, and admitted he could not tell how they knew where to go. The code was finally cracked in the twentieth century by an Austrian scientist who spent decades watching bees and testing what each part of the dance meant, and in 1973 that patient work was recognised with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It is one of the very few times people have learned to read a message passed between animals, and the message turned out to be a map.