I read about this yesterday, and the “waggle dance” is just so fun to hear. It makes me curious how powerful this dance is and how it can somehow make them communicate with each other or something.
In: Biology
From various experiments, it seems like they have a sort of rough “language” associated with different “dance moves.”
If the food is close by, they dance in a circle. Since the food is so close, there’s no real need to communicate direction. Presumably, the bees just either follow her or find it easily enough by wandering on their own.
If it’s farther away, the bee does the “waggle” dance where they walk forward for a short distance, then loop around back to the start, walk forward, loop around the other direction, and repeat. They communicate direction with the straight forward walk, which is towards the food. They tell the distance mostly by walking farther during that straight line – the longer the straight line portion lasts, the farther away the food is.
[Here is a video of a bee doing its dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZrNs22FAU)
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