How Do Honeybees Tell Nestmates Where the Flowers Are with a Figure-Eight Dance?
– The Way They Turn the Sun's Angle into a Body Direction
A honeybee that has found good flowers returns to the hive and starts to dance in the pitch dark, shaking its body as it traces a figure eight. It has no map and cannot speak. So how can this "dance" alone guide its nestmates to the exact spot?
Inside the dark hive there is no map and no view of the outside world. Yet the bees watching the dance leave the hive and fly straight toward the flowers.
How does the forager turn two invisible pieces of information, "direction" and "distance", into body movements?
The tilt of the straight run through the middle of the dance (its angle from "up" in the hive) is thought to match the angle between the direction of the sun and the direction of the flowers.
The longer the bee shakes its body during the straight run, the farther away the flowers are. That is the relationship scientists have described.
Let's look at each idea in turn: direction shown by angle, and distance shown by length.
Why the Angle of the Dance Stands for the Sun–Flower Angle
It is pitch dark inside a hive, so the bees cannot see the sun itself. Instead, they are thought to use "up, against gravity" on the comb in place of the direction of the sun. If the flowers lie 40 degrees to the right of the sun, the bee also tilts its straight run 40 degrees to the right of "up" on the comb. In the dark, the other bees are thought to read this body direction (the direction of the vibration) by feeling it with their antennae from behind.
The sun moves across the sky as the hours go by. Bees are thought to use an internal clock to correct for the sun's movement and keep updating the angle of their dance. This is why a bee that dances for a long time has been seen to shift its angle little by little as it goes.
Why the Length of the Dance Stands for Distance
The length (duration) of the straight, body-shaking part of the dance (the waggle run) gets longer the farther away the flowers are. That is the relationship scientists have described. Nearby flowers get a short dance, and distant flowers get a long one. Using this relationship, you can work backward from the length of the dance to the rough distance.
It turns invisible "direction" and "distance" into things a body can show: angle and time.
Things You Can Check for Yourself
- On a sheet of paper, draw a dot for the hive entrance and an arrow pointing straight up from it (standing in for the sun).
- Mark the position of the "flowers" at any angle you like from the entrance.
- On a second sheet, draw the "straight run of the dance" at the same angle as the one between the entrance and the sun arrow.
- Check that the angle in the outside world carries over unchanged into the angle on the paper.
What the bees do in the dark is thought to be this same job of "swapping an outside angle onto a different reference".
Summary
The honeybee's figure-eight dance is more than a display of excitement. It is thought to turn the angle between the sun and the flowers into a body tilt measured from "up" on the comb, and turn the distance to the flowers into the length of time spent shaking. Even in the dark hive, these two pieces of information are enough for nestmates to reach the flowers accurately.
A honeybee does not draw a map.
It turns its own body into a ruler for direction and distance.
For another example of passing on information through action, see the article on ants, which form lines by following scent trails. The way the sun's position helps find direction is also explained in the article on migrating birds.
For Those Who Want to Know More: Terms, Numbers and Links to TextbooksFrom middle-school science to active research, each part is labelled by level
- Middle schoolCovered in middle-school science
- High schoolCovered in high-school "Basic Biology"
- High school+Advanced or sidebar material in high-school textbooks
- UniversitySpecialist university content (animal behaviour) not taught in high school
- ResearchTopics researchers are still investigating, not taught even at university as settled fact
Middle schoolTerms: words used about the honeybee dance
- Figure-eight dance (waggle dance): behaviour in which a bee that has found flowers tells nestmates the direction and distance inside the hive.
- Straight run (waggle run): the part through the middle of the figure eight where the bee runs straight while shaking its body. The direction and distance information is packed into this part.
High schoolChecking with a formula: finding the real direction from the dance angle
Let's use the angle on the comb to work out the real compass direction of the flowers, measured against the direction of the sun.
Flower direction = sun direction + dance angle (clockwise from up is positive)
| Sun direction | At the time of observation, 120 degrees clockwise from true north |
| Dance angle | 40 degrees clockwise from "up" on the comb |
| Flower direction | 120 + 40 = 160 |
| Result | 160 degrees clockwise from true north |
Using the relationship that a longer straight run means more distant flowers, let's find a rough guide to the distance. Here we use a commonly quoted rule of thumb: each second of duration adds about 750 m.
| Duration | Take it as 4 seconds |
| Distance guide (m) | 750 × 4 = 3000 |
| Convert to km | 3000 ÷ 1000 = 3 |
| Result | Flowers about 3000 m (3 km) away |
* The relationship between duration and distance is said to vary with species and flying conditions. The 750 m figure here is only a rough guide for understanding the mechanism.
160 degrees is a direction a little west of due south, measured from true north. The bee watching the dance is not doing this sum in its head; it is thought to feed the angle it senses through its body straight into its own flight direction. If you know the direction of the sun, you can work out the direction of the flowers from the dance angle, and the formula confirms that relationship.
High school+The rough relationship between dance length and distance
Several studies have reported that the duration of the straight run (waggle run) gets longer as the distance increases. The exact ratio is said to change with the kind of bee and with flying conditions that day (such as wind), so the numbers are not always identical. Even so, the broad trend that a longer dance means more distant flowers has been widely confirmed.
UniversityTesting the "dance language" in animal behaviour research
In animal behaviour research, whether honeybees really use the dance as information about direction and distance has been a long-running question. Research that systematically showed the meaning of the dance won a Nobel Prize in the middle of the 20th century, but an objection long persisted: that bees might find flowers by smell alone, not by the dance information. In the 2000s, experiments tracked the actual flight paths of bees with small radar, and they are reported to have confirmed that bees really do fly to the place given by the direction and distance read from the dance.
ResearchWhat is still unclear
- How accurately the dance carries information other than direction and distance (such as flower quality or type) is still being studied.
- The detailed sensory mechanism by which other bees read the vibrations of the dance in the dark is still being worked out.
- The share of nestmates that actually use dance information to go looking for flowers, and how they balance that against searching on their own without it, are also being studied in behavioural ecology.
Even one small honeybee dance holds a rich, still-active research topic where animal behaviour and information science meet.
Links to Textbooks (by Level)
| Level | Subject / unit | Where in this article |
|---|---|---|
| Middle school | Science: animal behaviour | Figure-eight dance, basic terms for the straight run |
| High school | Basic Biology: animal behaviour (advanced) | Angle calculation |
| High school+ | Biology: behaviour and information (advanced) | Relationship between dance length and distance |
| University | Animal behaviour | Testing the dance language, radar tracking experiments |
| Research | Behavioural ecology (under study) | Whether extra information is carried, sensory mechanisms, individual differences in using the information |
- Classic research by von Frisch, K. on the honeybee dance language.
- Explanations of how the angle and distance of the figure-eight dance correspond, in animal behaviour reference materials.
- A research review of experiments that tracked honeybee flight paths using small radar (harmonic radar).
* The figures linking dance angle and duration to direction and distance are rough guides for understanding the mechanism. Actual values are said to vary with species and conditions.
* This article is a general-audience science explainer. The figures given are rough estimates to help you understand the mechanism. Actual values are said to vary with species, individual and observing conditions.