How Honeybees Communicate

A. When a foraging honeybee discovers a rich patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs a series of repeated movements on the vertical surface of the comb. For nectar sources close to the hive — generally within about a hundred metres — she performs what researchers call the round dance, circling first in one direction and then the other. This pattern tells her nestmates that food is nearby but conveys little about its precise direction; the recruits simply fly out and search the surrounding area, guided by the floral scent still clinging to the dancer's body. The vigour and duration of the dance signal how profitable the source is, so an especially rewarding patch triggers longer and more energetic performances.

B. For more distant food, the forager switches to the waggle dance, a figure-eight pattern whose central straight run carries remarkably specific information. The angle of that run relative to vertical corresponds to the angle of the food source relative to the sun's current position, so a run pointing straight upward means the flowers lie directly toward the sun. Because bees dance inside a dark hive, followers cannot see the performance; instead they press close to the dancer, sensing the vibrations of her body and the air currents produced by her buzzing wings. The duration of the waggle portion encodes distance, with roughly each additional second of waggling indicating several hundred metres of extra flight.

C. The meaning of these dances was deciphered in the mid-twentieth century by an Austrian researcher who marked individual bees with tiny dots of paint and tracked them between feeding stations and glass-walled observation hives. His conclusion — that an insect could communicate symbolic information about objects far outside the hive — was so startling that many scientists initially dismissed it, arguing that recruits were merely following odours. Decades of subsequent experiments, including studies using robotic dancing bees, eventually confirmed the original interpretation, and the discovery was recognized with a share of a major international science prize in 1973.

D. Dancing is not reserved for flowers alone. When a colony outgrows its hive and swarms, scout bees investigate hollow trees and other cavities, then return to the clustered swarm and dance to advertise the sites they have found. Scouts promoting superior locations dance longer and more insistently, gradually persuading scouts from lesser sites to switch their allegiance. Only when the dancers reach a broad consensus does the entire swarm lift off and fly to the chosen home — a process often described as one of the clearest examples of collective decision-making in the animal world.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.