Chapter 6. Behavioral Communications

6.2. The waggle dance

Image on left: waggling causes the dancer to be blurred while the other bees are clearly photographed (photo credit: Scott Camazine). Notice the bees behind and on sides paying attention to the dancer.

When food is far away (> 80 meters away for Carniolan bees, and > 6 meters for Italian bees) and honey bee workers need to communicate the distance and direction, they perform the waggle dance, essentially saying "there is food somewhere, here is how you would get there." Similar to round dance, the dances also offer food samples to increase the motivation of "dance followers" to go to the food. Very different from the round dance however, the dancers now essentially "recreate" a miniaturized version of their journey to the food, but with a caveat. Bees normally live inside a dark place (such as a tree hole), therefore they cannot see the direction of the sun. However, all the combs are hanging vertically, and all workers have sensors (called "proprioceptors") to know which direction is UP. So workers all "agree" that the up direction would represent the direction toward the sun, while 30 degrees to right of the up direction would represent the food is 30 degrees to the right of sunlight azimuth. They therefore point to this direction when they waggle during part of the dance. The dancers emit audible sound during this waggle which we can hear. The duration of the waggle is positively correlated with the distance, so that the further away is the food source, the longer the waggle run.

The image at left indicates the pathway of the waggle dance. The Video at the right side shows the actual waggle dance in motion (source: pbs.org). Click on the play botton ">" to see the video.

The figure above left shows that the food is about 75 degrees to the left of the sun's azimuth, therefore when the forager returns to the hive, she would perform the dance, waggling in the same direction relative to the up position, i.e. 75 degees to the left side of the top direction.

In many sub-species of bees, there is a transitional form between the round dance and the waggle dance, this dance is called the sickle dance. In this dance, the two waggle runs point to different directions, therefore, one has to draw an imaginary line in the center to point to the direction of the food.

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