Researched
Honeybee dance language decoded
Karl von Frisch showed that a forager's waggle dance tells nestmates the direction and distance of food; he shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for behaviour research.
Open in the interactive tree →The angle of the waggle run from vertical gives the direction relative to the sun, and its duration gives the distance (about 0.5 s at 200 m to about 4 s at 4,500 m in his film data). Harmonic-radar tracking of recruited bees in 2005 supported his reading after early scepticism.