The insect that communicates the location of food by performing a waggle dance is the honeybee. A returning worker moves in a repeated figure-eight pattern, with a central “waggle run” that conveys information to other workers in the hive.
The angle of the waggle run indicates the direction of the food relative to the sun, while the run’s duration helps signal distance. The dancer also carries the scent of the flowers it visited, giving potential recruits another clue about what they should search for. This lets a colony exploit scattered sources of nectar and pollen without every bee having to discover them independently.
Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch was among the first scientists to decode the dance and received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on animal behavior. The waggle dance is not a human-like language with grammar, and researchers continue to study how precisely follower bees use its information. Related bees may perform simpler recruitment movements, but the classic waggle dance is associated with honeybees.