Dancing Bees

It isn’t a salsa, samba, tango or waltz, but is just as intricate. This dance is performed repeated throughout the day in honey bees hives around the world.

The above video shows a worker who has recently returned from a foraging trip. By the color of the pollen on her back legs, she’s pretty excited about the patch of dandelions she found. Her job now, as a dancer, is to give explicit directions to this choice site. As you can see in the video, she has a few interested foragers.

The basic waggle dance pattern follows a figure-eight circuit.

Left half of waggle dance

Our dancing bee starts by ‘waggling’ her abdomen back and forth and back and forth as she runs forward. At the end of her ‘run’ she will walk around to the left and begin the dance all over again.

Right half of waggle dance

She will ‘run’ again in the same direction waggling her abdomen for the same amount of time. At the end of this ‘run’ she will turn to the right and complete the figure-eight pattern.

To keep her followers interested, she may stop briefly to share some of the nectar she has collected. This way her sisters know what type of flower they are looking for.

Duration to distance of waggle dances

Believe it or not, extensive studies have been done on deciphering the waggle dance. Basically, the duration of the dance indicates the distance from the hive to the luscious source of nectar/pollen. Roughly one second of waggling equals 1000 meters.

The direction and length of the waggling (which will always be the same for the duration of the dance) gives the exact location of the flowers in relationship to the sun. Sounds complicated? It is.

Fortunately, honey bees are much better at geometry than I am!

Forty degree waggle dance

The angle that she waggles, as opposed to going straight up, is directly related to the angle of the sun in relation to the nectar/pollen source. The worker in the video is on about a 135 degree angle.

Honey bee navigation

The other foraging bees learn the dance and know exactly where they’re headed when they leave the hive. The final key to finding that amazing patch of flowers is scent.  This they would have picked up from sampling nectar from the bee doing the initial dance. Recruited foragers make a bee-line from the hive to the nectar/pollen source.

So much for thinking how brilliant we are with our GPS. Honey bees have been pin-pointing locations for thousands of years!

Foraging honey bee in alfalfa