The dance honey bees perform to communicate the location of food is the waggle dance. A successful worker bee uses it inside the hive to advertise a profitable source of nectar or pollen to other foragers.
The bee runs a repeated figure-eight pattern, including a straight “waggle run” in which its abdomen vibrates rapidly. The angle of that run relative to the sun indicates the direction of the food source, while the run’s duration communicates distance. Longer waggle runs generally point to resources farther from the hive.
The waggle dance is not simply any figure-eight movement. Honey bees also perform a round dance for nearby resources, and the two behaviors form part of a distance-related continuum. The round dance may be used when food is very close, while the waggle dance becomes more pronounced as the distance increases.
The system was famously studied by Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch, whose work helped establish that bees exchange navigational information through movement. The advertised resource may also be water or a potential nest site, not only food.