waggle dance

The waggle dance is the repeating, figure-eight-shaped movement a honey bee performs on the vertical surface of the comb to tell other bees in the hive the direction and distance of a distant food source. The angle of the central straight "waggle run" from vertical encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun, while the duration of the run encodes its distance. The code was deciphered in the first half of the 20th century by the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for the work.