Why Bees Do the Waggle Dance

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Honey bees are incredibly social insects. They live together in big groups with other bees in an organized society that scientists call eusocial, which means every bee has a job to do. This could be caring for larvae, gathering food, cleaning the hive, or many other jobs. Because of this, it’s essential that bees know how to communicate with each other.

The above video shows a fascinating look at the behavior of a colony of bees in their hive. One bee performs a little dance where she walks in a circle, then does a wiggle, and walks in the opposite direction, repeating her wiggle. Beekeepers call this the waggle dance, and it’s how bees communicate to other bees that they have discovered a food source and where it’s located.

What Is the Bee Waggle Dance?

Researchers have carefully studied bees’ waggle dances and found that after finding a source of nectar, the bee returns to the hive to share knowledge of the food source. By releasing pheromones and completing the dance, the bee tells the others the distance and direction of where to find the nectar. The longer the dance goes on, the further away the flowers are. The angle of the waggle communicates to the others which direction to fly. The bee also brings a sample along so the other bees know the smell and taste of the nectar.

Interestingly, researchers have found that the dance does not appear to be instinctual. Instead, it’s learned by watching other bees. This is what is known as social learning. In a study completed in 2023, scientists found that bees that had followed other dancing bees did a much better job at communicating the location of the food source when it was their turn to dance. However, bees that hadn’t had the same training struggled to correctly share both the distance and direction. They did, however, get better with some practice.

What Other Types of Dances Do Honey Bees Perform?

While honey bees are the only type of bee that performs the waggle dance, these bees also perform two other dances that communicate important information to the hive. The first is the “round” dance, which tells the group that food is nearby. The second is the “tremble” dance, which alerts others that a large amount of nectar is being brought back to the hive by the foraging bees and help is needed to collect it.

Colony Organization

Honey bees live in hives with thousands of other bees containing anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 members. Each colony has one queen, and they protect and follow her. The queen has two major jobs: to lay eggs (she’s the only fertile female) and to release pheromones that hold the group together.

The other two types of bees in a colony are drones and workers. The drones are male bees whose sole purpose is to mate with a queen. They don’t mate with their own queen but travel to drone congregation areas to compete with other drones for the chance of mating with a queen. If successful, they die shortly after mating. If they don’t win the chance to mate, they can live in their home colony for a while. But, most or all will be kicked out by the females during winter when resources get tight. Although the drones don’t live long and don’t seem to have much work to do beyond mating, without healthy drones, the bee colony would collapse.

The third type of bee is the worker bee. These are the females that carry out the important work for the colony. They clean the hive, gather nectar, take care of eggs and larvae, guard their hive, build beeswax, and more. These are the bees that perform the dances, alerting other workers to the location of nectar.

Bee Intelligence

The more we learn about bees, the more we understand how intelligent these insects are. Besides being able to direct others to food sources, bees can solve puzzles, count, and navigate as well. We know they use the sun as their guide, and they may even use Earth’s magnetic fields to know where they are going.

What Would a World Without Bees Look Like?

We need bees to pollinate our crops. If all the bees were to die off tomorrow, farmers would experience low crop yields, and countries would struggle to feed their people. We would have to turn to other ways of pollinating crops, such as robotic pollination. Fortunately, honey bees are abundant and not at risk of extinction.