How Bees Talk

A honeybee cannot speak, and it cannot draw a map. However, when it finds a place with lots of flowers, it can tell the other bees in its hive where to find them. How does it do this? It dances.

In every hive, some bees have a special job: they fly out to look for food. These bees are called foragers. When a forager has found a field of flowers, it flies home with the news. Inside, it walks onto the honeycomb, where the bees keep their honey, and starts to dance. The other bees come close and follow its movements.

The most famous of these dances is the waggle dance. It gets its name from the word "waggle," which means to shake quickly from side to side. First, the bee walks forward in a straight line while it shakes its body. This part is called the waggle run. Then the bee stops shaking, walks in a half circle back to where it started, and does the straight run again. It does this again and again so that lots of bees can learn the message.

The direction of the straight run tells the other bees which way to fly. The honeycomb hangs straight up and down, and in the dance, "straight up" stands for the direction of the sun. So if the run goes straight up, the food is in the same direction as the sun. If it goes straight down, the food is in the opposite direction, so the other bees will fly away from the sun, not toward it. If the run points a little to the right of straight up, the food is a little to the right of the sun. In other words, the angle between the run and "straight up" is the same as the angle between the sun and the food.

The dance also shows how far away the food is. A short waggle run means that the food is quite near, while a longer run means that it is farther away. When the food is very close to the hive, the dance is short and looks more like a circle.

For a long time, people did not understand what these dances meant. The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch spent many years watching bees and studying their "language." His work showed how the parts of the dance carry information about direction and distance. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The next time you see a bee on a flower, remember that it may soon fly home and "tell" the others where it has been. Although it has no words, it has a clever way of sharing what it knows.