When a honeybee finds a good patch of flowers, it does not simply fly back and rest. It returns to the dark inside of the hive and begins to move in a pattern that other bees can feel and follow. Scientists call this pattern the waggle dance.
The dance looks like a figure eight. In the straight middle section, the bee shakes its body from side to side. The direction of that straight run tells the other bees which way to fly, measured against the position of the sun. The length of the run tells them how far to go: a longer waggle means a longer flight.
This system is remarkable because the hive is completely dark. The watching bees cannot see the dancer. Instead they press close and sense the vibrations through the honeycomb, then leave and fly toward a place they have never visited.
Researchers first described the waggle dance in detail in the middle of the twentieth century, and careful experiments since then have supported the explanation. When scientists moved food sources farther away, the waggle runs grew longer, exactly as the theory predicted.
The dance is not perfect. Bees make small errors, and some followers end up searching a wider area than the dancer intended. Scientists think this imperfection may actually help the colony, because wandering bees sometimes discover flowers nobody knew about.