This is the waggle dance, one of the most sophisticated forms of communication known outside of human language. Here’s what the dance actually communicates, how it works, and why it’s such a big deal to biologists.

Quick Answer

Bees perform the waggle dance to tell nestmates the direction and distance of a good food source (or a new nest site) relative to the sun, so other foragers can fly straight there without having to search on their own. The angle of the dance encodes direction and the length of the waggle run encodes distance.

How the Waggle Dance Actually Works

A forager bee that finds a rich source of nectar or pollen returns to the dark interior of the hive and performs a repeated figure-eight pattern on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. The central, straight-line portion — the ‘waggle run’ — is where the real information is packed in. The bee vibrates her abdomen side to side roughly 13 times per second while walking in a straight line, then circles back to one side, repeats the run, circles back the other way, and so on.

The angle of the waggle run relative to straight up on the comb tells other bees the direction of the food relative to the sun’s position. If the food source is directly toward the sun, the bee waggles straight up. If it’s 40 degrees to the left of the sun, she angles her run 40 degrees to the left of vertical — and so on around the full circle. Because bees can’t see the sun inside the dark hive, they’ve essentially learned to use ‘up’ on the comb as a stand-in for the sun’s direction.

Distance is encoded in how long the waggle run lasts. Longer waggle runs mean the food source is farther away; shorter runs mean it’s closer. Bees also add scent cues from the flowers they visited, picked up on their body, which helps followers recognize the right blossoms once they arrive in the right area.

Why This Discovery Mattered

Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch spent decades studying honey bee behavior and worked out the meaning of the waggle dance by the 1940s, showing that the angle of the dance shifted predictably as the sun moved across the sky and as the direction to a food source changed. His work on bee communication earned him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, for pioneering research into animal behavior.

The waggle dance isn’t the only dance bees perform. For very close food sources, foragers often do a simpler ’round dance’ that signals food is nearby without giving precise direction, and dance styles gradually transition into the full waggle pattern as distance increases. Bees also use a separate ‘tremble dance’ to recruit more hive-mates to process incoming nectar when foragers are struggling to unload it fast enough. And when a colony is choosing a new home during swarming, scout bees use waggle dances to advertise candidate nest sites and effectively ‘vote’ until the group reaches a consensus.

Tips for Understanding (and Spotting) the Dance

If you keep bees or watch an observation hive, look for the dance shortly after a forager returns heavily loaded with pollen or looking especially purposeful — dances are most common during a strong nectar flow. The tighter and more vigorous the waggle run, the more excited the bee is about the source, and better sources tend to attract more followers dancing the same direction over time.

A common misconception is that the dance gives GPS-precise coordinates. In reality it points followers toward a general direction and distance, and they use scent and their own search once they’re in the right neighborhood. Another mistake is assuming all dances mean food — remember that scout bees also waggle dance to advertise potential new nest sites, and tremble dances communicate a totally different message about nectar processing capacity back at the hive.

Explore more: More science explainers.

Waggle dance FAQs

How far can the food source be for a bee to still do a waggle dance?

Waggle dances are typically used for sources at least a few dozen meters away, and can encode distances of a mile or more. Closer sources tend to get a simpler round dance instead.

Do bees dance in complete darkness?

Yes. The interior of the hive is dark, so followers can’t see the dance visually — they follow along by touch, sensing the dancer’s movements and the vibrations and sounds she produces.

Can other bee species do a waggle dance?

The waggle dance is best known in the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), but related dance communication has also been documented in other honey bee species in the genus Apis.

Do bees ever lie or make mistakes in their dances?

Dances aren’t perfectly precise — there’s natural variation in the angle and duration a bee produces, which is part of why followers spread out around the target area rather than flying to one exact point.

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Photo: Richard Bartz, Munich Makro Freak & Beemaster Hubert Seibring, Munich which gave me advice and a protection suite  My dog cashed 6 bee-sticks on the nose, i cashed 4. / CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

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