How do honeybees give directions by dancing?

A honeybee that finds good flowers comes home and dances. On the vertical wall of the comb, she runs a small figure-eight: a straight "waggle run" while shaking her body, then a loop back to the start, then another waggle run, looping the other way. The waggle run is the message. Its direction gives the direction of the flowers, and its length gives the distance.

The code uses the Sun. A waggle run pointing straight up the comb means "fly towards the Sun". A run pointing 40 degrees to the right of up means "fly 40 degrees to the right of the Sun". Distance is encoded in time: the farther the flowers, the longer the waggle. And enthusiasm counts too. The more excited a bee is about a spot, the faster she waggles, to grab her sisters' attention and win them over. Bees even correct their dance as the hours pass, shifting the angle to follow the Sun's movement across the sky.

The man who cracked this code was the German-Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch. His 1927 book was met with widespread scepticism, and it took decades for the idea to be accepted. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The story has a twist, though. Bees don't always follow directions. In one experiment, most bees that carefully watched a dance ignored its location information, and 93% simply went back to feeding spots they already knew. The dance matters most when bees have no better information of their own.