How Bees Talk to Each Other

Honeybees do not have voices. They do not write letters, and they certainly do not send text messages. And yet, every day, inside the warm hum of a beehive, hundreds of bees manage to share precise information with each other — directions to the best flowers, news about a new water source, and warnings about danger. They do all of this with one of the most remarkable forms of communication in the animal kingdom: the waggle dance.

When a worker bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs a dance on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. The dance has two parts. First, the bee walks in a straight line, waggling her body from side to side. Then she circles back to her starting point, alternating between a left circle and a right circle, so that her path traces a flat figure of eight. The other bees gather around her, antennae lifted, watching closely.

Astonishingly, every part of the dance carries information. The direction the bee walks — measured against the position of the sun — tells the other bees the direction they must fly. The length of time she waggles tells them how far away the flowers are: a longer waggle means a longer journey. And the vigour of her dance — how energetic and enthusiastic it is — tells the others how rich the flowers are.

The discovery of the waggle dance, by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch in the 1940s, was so surprising that many other scientists refused to believe it. It earned him a Nobel Prize in 1973. Today, the waggle dance is studied in classrooms all over the world, a reminder that even the smallest creatures may be doing something far more clever than we ever expected.