What type of information is conveyed by bees performing the wagtail dance?

The worker communicates several key pieces of information during the dance. The longer she waggles - typically bees make between one and 100 waggle runs per dance - the farther the flower patch lies from the hive, with every 75 milliseconds she prolongs the dance adding roughly another 330 feet to the distance. She shows how rich the source is by how long and/or how vigorously she dances. Perhaps most astonishingly, she indicates the direction of the source by the angle her waggle walk deviates from an imaginary straight line drawn from the dance floor to the sun at its current position. In other words, if the source lies in the exact direction of the sun, the bee will walk facing exactly straight up (remember that a hive hangs vertically). If it lies 20 degrees to the right of that imaginary line to the sun, the angle of the bee's walk will be 20 degrees to the right of vertical. Finally, the dancer shares the odor of the flowers in question with the other bees, who sample it with their antennae.

Attendees will watch only one waggle dance and only for a brief period before leaving the hive. In this way, the bee works for the good of the hive rather than for the good of herself. If she stayed for the whole dance, she would know exactly how rich the source is, for instance. But if all bees waited for the entire dance to take place, and then only went to the richest sources, the colony would not be maximizing its use of available resources. This behavior is one of many instances of how, when it comes to honeybees, natural selection operates on the level of the colony, not the individual bee.

Finally, workers do the "tremble" dance when foragers have brought so much nectar back to the hive that more bees are needed to process the nectar into honey. Walking slowly around the nest, the dancer quivers her legs, causing her body to tremble forward and backward and from side to side. Lasting sometimes more than an hour, the tremble dance stimulates additional bees to begin processing nectar.

The honey bee dance – also known as the waggle dance, is a form of communication performed by worker honey bees to other members of the honey bee colony. 

The waggle dance was famously decoded by Austrian scientist, Karl von Frisch – more about that later.

Here you can learn about when, why and where honey bees perform the waggle dance.  You can also read about which bees perform the dance, and its meaning.

When, why and where do honey bees perform a waggle dance?

As far as we know, the honey bee waggle dance is performed to communicate the location of a good source of food (nectar rich flowers), or water, and also to describe the whereabouts of the site of a potential new home for a swarming bee colony.

Research suggests individual honey bees may also perform a dance when they wish to be cleaned (groomed) by other bees.

Waggle dancing to locate a source of food

A honey bee colony consists of thousands and thousands of workers, with each of the workers performing varied roles within this amazing superorganism as it matures. 

The role of forager is performed by worker bees of around 20 or more days old. When foraging worker honey bees fly out of the nest or hive, they seek flowers from which they will gather nectar and/or pollen within a foraging range that could extend several kilometers from the nest or hive.

Upon finding a suitable source of nectar, they gather it, and return and perform a waggle dance to tell other colony members about the location of the food they have brought back home.

This waggle dance takes place inside the nest, on top of the comb.

Do bees automatically follow the instructions, or do bees 'do their own thing' and find their own patch of flowers?
Research suggests that the waggle dance is an important means by which the more experienced foraging worker bees recruit and assist the less experienced novices (bees new to foraging).

Indeed, Biesmeijer and Seeley (2005) showed that novice foragers depended on information from waggle dances to help them locate flowers 60% of the time. 

Waggle dancing to communicate the location of water

For various reasons, through the year, a number of honey bee workers will need to collect water.  Honey bees that find water will use a dance to convey the location to fellow colony members.  See Do Bees Drink Water?

Waggle dancing to locate a potential new nest site

Honey bee workers with queen

In an amazing display of collective consciousness (or 'hive mind'), a swarm of honey bees is on the look out for a new home.

In the search for a new place to live, most of the bees remain in the swarm (in the form of a mass or clump) around a queen, whilst the searching for possible nest sites is performed by scout bees, who are mature worker bees.

Upon finding a possible site, scout bees return to the swarm, and perform a waggle dance to communicate its whereabouts. 

This waggle dance takes place actually on the swarm itself, with the scout honey bee literally trampling over other bees whilst she performs the dance on the outer layer of the swarm to communicate the position of the site.

Here is a short video showing the dance of a scout bee on a swarm (continue reading for a detailed description of the dance itself).

The Meaning of The Honey Bee Dance

Upon returning to her colony (whether it be back at the nest or hive, or in a swarm), an excited honey bee performs a type of round dance, with intermittent waggles of her tail and ‘buzzing’ of her wings.

Each waggle dance consists of a series of dance circuits, and each dance circuit contains a waggle run and a return run, which is a miniaturized re-enactment of her recent trip over the countryside. 

It can be described as follows:

1. First the dancer walks straight ahead, waggling her body from side to side (a “waggle run”).
2. She then stops and turns left or right to make a semi-circular “return run” back to her original starting point.
3. Upon her return to start point, she performs another waggle run followed by another return to start, and so on.
4. The duration of the waggle run is directly proportional to the length of the outward journey, and both duration and rate of waggle-run production increase with rising food-source profitability. On average, one second of the total dance (including tail wagging and wing buzzing) represents some 1km (1,000 meters or six-tenths of a mile) of flight.


5. Bees have an internal sun compass (or internal clock) and use solar navigation in the dance.  The angle of the waggle run, relative to 'straight up' on the vertical comb or swarm clump, represents the angle of the outward journey relative to the direction of the sun.

   In other words, if the forager or scout bee walks directly upward while producing a waggle run, she is telling the other colony members to head toward the sun (i.e. the feeding place is in the same direction as the sun).

   Alternatively, if the dancing bee heads 40 degrees to the right of vertical, her message to other colony members is that the site is 40 degrees to the right of the sun.

6. The clever honey bee can even take into account the amount of wind!  A strong headwind will cause the bee to dance as if the food was further away, thus indicating that more energy will be expended to reach this source of food.

Video of the honey bee waggle dance

Here is a more detailed video explaining the waggle dance of the worker honey bee forager.

Karl von Frisch:  Decoding the honey bee waggle dance

Born in Vienna, Austria, Karl von Frisch was and ethologist. An ethologist is a scientist who studies the behaviour of animals in their natural environment.  He worked in the department of zoology at the University of Munich in Germany.

He began studying and decoding the waggle dance in 1944, and published “Die Tänze der Bienen” (The Dance of the Bees) in 1946, in which he demonstrated how successful honey bee foragers perform a dance to communicate the location of valuable food resources to fellow colony members back at the hive.

In recognition of his discovery, von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in 1973.

The work of von Frisch was the starting point of many subsequent areas of investigation into honey bee communication, for example by Martin Lindauer and notable author and professor Thomas D. Seeley.

Seeley has conducted much research about the lives of honey bees, and explored collective consciousness (or hive mind) in the colony.

A dance to say 'please clean me'!

In their research entitled: The grooming invitation dance of the honey bee, Land and Seeley state that the grooming invitation dance is a striking behavior in honey bee colonies, during which a worker bee stands stationary and vibrates her whole body from side-to-side, sometimes adding brief bouts of self-grooming.  

Bees that perform the grooming invitation dance have a far higher probability of being quickly groomed by a nest mate than do bees that do not perform the dance. 

Grooming is an important method for bees to clean themselves and each other.

You can read more about this, on my page How Do Bees Clean Themselves, Each Other And The Nest or Hive?

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