Waggle dance

The waggle dance is a special 'figure-of-eight' dance that is done by the honey bee in its hive. By this, a worker tells the others where it has found nectar. This was shown by the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch.

The dance is a type of communication for bees. It is done to give other bees information about the direction and distance to flowers that have nectar or pollen, or both. It is also used to tell the bees where water can be found.

The dance is used for bees to get others to help them collect resources for the hive. It used to be thought that bees have two distinct "recruitment" dances. There were the "round dances" and waggle dances. Round dances were thought to be used for things that were close by and wiggle dances were for things farther away. It is now known that a round dance is only a waggle dance with a very short "waggle run" (see below).

Description
A waggle dance is made up of one to 100 or more circuits. Each circuit has two phases. These phases are the waggle phase and the return phase. When a bee returns to the hive after finding a good food source, it performs the dance.  The bee will run through a small wave-like pattern (a waggle run or waggle phase). After this, it will turn to the right and circle back to the starting point (the return phase). It will then do another waggle run and then turn to the left and circle back to the beginning. The waggle phase of the dance is the most notable and informative part of the dance.

The direction and duration of waggle runs show the direction and distance to flowers.  Flowers that are located directly in line with the sun are shown by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs. If the flowers are at an angle to the right or left of the sun, the waggle run is done at the same angle to the upward direction.  The distance between hive and flowers is shown in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the flowers are from the hive, the longer the waggle phase. For every 100 meters the flowers are distant from the hive, the waggle phase lasts about 75 milliseconds.

Applications to operations research
People study the swarm intelligence of social insects and animals such as fish, birds, and ants. Recently, there has been research on using bee waggle dance behavior for fault-tolerant routing.Crina, Grosan; Abraham Ajith. (2006) Stigmergic Optimization: Inspiration, Technologies and Perspectives. Studies in Computational Intelligence. Vol. 31. pp. 1-24. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.  From the abstract of Wedde, Farooq, and Zhang (2004)

Another technique based on bees is called bee colony optimization. It is used help Internet servers communicate better.Nakrani, S. and C. Tovey 2004. On honey bees and dynamic server allocation in internet hosting centers. Adaptive Behaviour. 12, 223-240.C. Tovey 2004. The honey bee algorithm: a biological inspired approach to internet server optimization. Engineering Enterprise.

Other reading
Gould JL 1975. Honey bee recruitment: the dance-language controversy. Science 189:685−693.
Riley JR, Greggers U, Smith AD, Reynolds DR, Menzel R 2005. The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance". Nature 435:205-207.
Seeley TD 1995. The wisdom of the hive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
von Frisch K 1967. The dance language and orientation of bees. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Other websites
Communication and Recruitment to Food Sources by Apis mellifera  – USDA-ARS (accessed 2005-03)
Honeybee Communication  – Kimball's Biology Pages (accessed 2005-09)

References

Category:Animal communication
Category:Bees