#53: Waggle Dance

Litinsects #53: Waggle Dance

Communication in the animal kingdom comes in many forms... even dance! And honey bees are quite the dancers.

As you know, worker bees spend much of their time visiting flowers to forage (see Post #36 for a recap on honey). When a scout finds a particularly good patch of flowers (or even another resource like potential nesting site), she returns to the hive to recruit more workers to fly to the resource. In the case of a food source, she first regurgitates and distributes some of the nectar she has collected in order to grab the attention of her hive-mates. And then she tells them exactly where they can find more.

Enter the WAGGLE DANCE. This fascinating form of communication tells other bees in which direction and exactly how far to fly to find a resource. The waggle refers to the motion of the performer’s abdomen, which wiggles very quickly side to side. Here’s a play by play:

1. While waggling, the bee moves forward in a straight line, called the waggle run or the WAGGLE PHASE of the dance
2. Then without waggling, the bee loops around to the right back to starting position, known as the RETURN PHASE
3. The bee repeats another straight waggle phase
4. Then it loops around to the left back to starting position (return phase)

Overall the dance results in a figure 8 shape and the loops are repeated, anywhere from a few up to 100 or more times!

So what is the dance communicating and how?

-The length of the waggle run, so how many times the bee waggles its abdomen before starting the return phase, defines the DISTANCE to the resource. The longer the waggle run, the further away the flowers

-The orientation at which the waggle run takes place defines the DIRECTION. “Straight up” on the hive wall always represents the direction of the sun (even if the sun is not directly overhead at the time) and the angle from “up” at which the waggle happens represents the angle to fly with respect to the sun. In other words, a waggle performed vertically means “fly directly in the direction of the sun” while a waggle performed at 45° to the left of vertical means “fly 45° to the left of where the sun is". Bees that have spent a while at the hive performing their dance will even adjust their run angles to account for movement of the sun, how smart is that!? Even on a cloudy day they can sense the position of the sun in the sky by using polarized light!

And guess what? Karl von Frisch, the scientist credited with first decoding the meaning of the waggle dance was Austrian! He did experiments at Wolfgangsee near Salzburg.

While there is so much more to this behavior than I can share in this short post and so much yet to be discovered about it, I believe this form of communication, which requires memory, spatial skills, and other complex neurological processes, is just one more reason why bees are such awesome insects!