Waggle dance

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This article is about bee behavior. For the beer, see Wells & Young's Brewery. For the football play,
see bootleg play.

The waggle dance - the direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates direction; if it moves
vertically the direction to the source is directly towards the Sun. The duration of the waggle part of the
dance signifies the distance.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-
eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can
share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and
distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to
new nest-site locations.[1][2] The waggle dance and the round dance are two
forms of dance behaviour that are part of a continuous transition. The round
dance occurs for resources that are nearby (typically less than 1020 m from the
nest for Apis mellifera ligustica). As the distance to the resource increases, the
round dance transforms into the waggle dance. However, even close to the nest,
the round dance can contain elements of the waggle dance, such as a waggle
portion.[3] It has therefore been suggested that the term "waggle dance" is better
for describing both the waggle dance and the round dance.
[4]Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who
translated the meaning of the waggle dance.[5]
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