Dancing bees speak in code

By Michael Schirber

updated 8:50 p.m. ET May 27, 2005

Scientists have long marveled over the dance of the bee. A little jitterbug seems to reveal to coworkers the location of a distant meal. But how and whether the dance really works has remained controversial.

A new study confirms the dancing is a form of communication.

Bees outfitted with tracking devices responded to the wiggling of one of their fellow foragers, who had just returned to the hive from some newfound bee vittles.  The dance, which is performed on one of the honeycomb walls, is not an exact language, but it gets the job done.

The central element of the choreography is a shimmy, or waggle, along a straight line. For emphasis, the bee repeats this move several times by circling around in a figure-8 pattern. The angle that the shimmy makes in relation to an imaginary vertical line is the direction to the food source with respect to the sun.

For example, a waggle dance pointing towards 3 o’clock is bee talk for: "Hey, there’s food 90 degrees to the right of the sun."

A solar compass
This solar compass in honeybees was originally observed in the 1960s by the Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch. Later, it was noticed that the number of waggles in one figure-8 corresponds to the distance to the meal.

These remarkable relations have been supported by other experiments, including one in which a mechanical bee danced for the hive and the real bees responded. But there have remained doubts as to whether the other bees could actually decipher the dancer’s message.

"The dance isn’t a trivial demonstration, but an abstract code," says J. R. Riley of Rothamsted Research, UK.

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