One of the most dramatic developments in the study of animal behavior was Karl von Frisch's discovery in the 1940's that honeybees have a form of symbolic communication, the dance language.   This discovery came near the end of von Frisch's long scientific career, after he had been studying honeybees for some 20 years.  

Although the first scientific reactions ranged from polite doubt to vigorous attempts at disproof, the dance language has by now been repeatedly confirmed by many clever experiments in a variety of laboratories.   It continues to inspire fascinating new explorations of animal communication.

Bees returning to the hive with nectar (and sometimes other substances needed by the hive, like pollen, water, or the location of a new nest site), perform either round dances, if they have arrived from a location nearby, or waggle dances if they have arrived from farther away (more than 50-200 meters, depending on the genetic strain of bees).  

The waggle dance traces out a figure-8 pattern in which it encodes both the distance and the direction from the hive to the source of the nectar.   The distance is indicated by the average duration of a complete circuit (or the number of circuits in a given amount of time), and the direction from the hive toward the food with respect to the direction of the sun is indicated by the orientation of the waggle on the vertical honeycomb with respect to gravity.  

It is now definitely established that bees in the hive obtain information from their sisters' waggle dances about the location of food and then use this information when they leave the hive to forage.   In short, the dances tell other bees where to find food.

Foraging honeybees use other cues to find food as well, as von Frisch documented extensively, including the scent   and the color surrounding the food (in natural conditions, of course, without ethologists' experiments with sucrose solutions, nectar is obtained from flowers).

In this exercise, you will have a chance to observe bees dancing in their hive, to practice translating the dance language, and to see if you can find flowers the way bees do.

Your textbook includes more information about these dances and the information they include.

Under ideal conditions, experimenters mark bees with tiny spots of paint at artificial feeding stations supplied with concentrated sucrose solutions and then watch these bees dancing in the hive.   We cannot achieve this ideal on the Carolina campus, both because too many bees come to feeding stations from other hives (including feral colonies) within a few miles and because the bees from our hive have too many different sources of nectar available on campus.  

Careful experiments like those conducted by von Frisch and others have required hives isolated in large fields without flowers (football stadiums in the midst of parking lots work well!).   Nevertheless, we can see waggle dances and can often discover from them where our bees are finding food.

Using your understanding of the waggle dance, you should be able to estimate within about 100 m the location of a food source.  

• Work in teams of two or three.  
• Make careful measurements of the duration and orientation of the waggle dances by one bee, ideally at least ten dances.  
• Average your measurements to increase your precision.  
• Plot your results on a map.  
• After checking with your Teaching Assistant, go as a team to try to locate the food source.  
• Report back with evidence that you have in fact located the food your dancing bee was advertising in the hive.

Take time to observe the normal activities in the hive.   Notice the foragers and the hive attendants, the storage of nectar and pollen, and the feeding of larvae.   Try to locate the queen and her retinue.

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Frisch, K. von.   1967.   The dance language and orientation of honeybees.   Harvard University Press.   (The definitve description of his experiments.)

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