The Dance of the Bees

It is a warm spring morning, and somewhere beyond the hive, a field of clover has just burst into flower. A single honeybee has found it. She has drunk as much nectar as she can carry. Now she faces a remarkable problem: how to tell thousands of her sisters exactly where the flowers are, in the dark, without a single word.

Her solution is a dance. Back inside the hive, she climbs onto one of the vertical sheets of wax, known as combs. There she begins running in a short straight line while shaking her body rapidly from side to side. This movement is called the waggle run. At the end of it, she circles back to the starting point, first to the left and then to the right, before waggling again. Traced on the comb, her path looks like a figure eight, and it may be repeated dozens of times.

What makes the dance so extraordinary is how much information is packed into it. The direction of the waggle run tells the other bees which way to fly. Since there is no sky to point at inside the hive, gravity is used instead. A run straight up the comb means "fly towards the sun", while a run tilted forty degrees to the right of vertical means "fly forty degrees to the right of the sun". Distance, meanwhile, is shown by the length of the waggle run. The farther away the flowers are, the longer the dancer keeps waggling. Food that is very close, within a few dozen metres, is announced with a simpler round dance instead.

The other bees follow the dancer closely, touching her with their antennae and picking up the scent of the flowers on her body. After following a few runs, they leave the hive and head off in the right direction, often to fields several kilometres away. Even the movement of the sun is taken into account. Bees that dance for a long time gradually change the angle of their runs as the sun moves across the sky, so that the directions stay correct.

For a long time, nobody understood why bees moved so strangely on the combs. It was an Austrian scientist, Karl von Frisch, who finally decoded the dance, after years of watching marked bees, setting out dishes of sugar water and patiently measuring angles. In 1973, he shared a Nobel Prize with two other researchers of animal behaviour, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Surprisingly, it was not a prize for biology, which has no Nobel of its own. It was the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to a man who had spent his life watching insects dance in the dark.