How Bees Tell One Another Where to Go

[A] A honeybee that finds a rich patch of flowers does not simply return and rest. It walks across the vertical surface of the comb in a repeating figure-of-eight, running in a straight line through the middle of the pattern and waggling its abdomen as it goes. [B] Karl von Frisch, working in the 1940s, showed that this performance carries information.

The straight run encodes two things at once. [C] Its direction relative to vertical gives the direction of the food relative to the sun: a run straight upward means fly towards the sun, and a run thirty degrees to the left of vertical means thirty degrees to the left of the sun. Its duration gives the distance, with roughly one second of waggling for every kilometre to be flown. [D] Other bees crowd around the dancer, follow her through the pattern, and then leave the hive and search. The claim met resistance for decades, partly because it credited an insect with something close to symbolic communication. The objection was met in the end by a robot: a small mechanical bee, moved through the pattern by a computer, sent real foragers to locations that no live bee had ever visited.