Honeybees Shake It to Make It

​Take some, share some, shake it all around—that's what honeybee life is all about. Dancing helps these busy buzzers survive. There's even a dance floor in a honeybee hive!

Imagine you need to give someone directions to a place, but you can't speak or write. All you can do is perform a dance to tell them where to go. Does that sound tricky? Honeybees do it every day.

When a honeybee scouts out a source of super sweet nectar, it gathers some up. Next, it flies back to the hive to share the news—and dish out a taste of the goods. The honeybee zips around tempting the other bees with samples of the sugary stuff. Then, the bees gather on the "dance floor" near the hive's entrance.

It's not party time, though. What happens next is serious bee business.

​With the other bees assembled, the honeybee starts dancing. If the flowers are close to the hive, it does the "round dance." It makes a circle in one direction, then the other direction. The honeybee does this over and over again. Sometimes, it will throw in a little waggle. Scientists think this belly-shaking part of a round dance tells the other bees about the quality of the flowers that have been found.

If the nectar is far away, the honeybee really shakes things up, with an all-out "waggle dance."

To perform the waggle dance, the bopping bee first moves in a figure-eight pattern. Then it walks in a straight line while shaking its abdomen. The time spent waggling in a line tells the other bees exactly how far they need to travel to get to the nectar. The line dance is never long, though. To get an idea of how quickly it happens, blink your eyes one time. A blink takes about 100 milliseconds. So does a bee's line dance. That's some speedy communication!

​And that's not all the dancing honeybee communicates in the blink of an eye. The dance also tells the others which way to fly. It all depends on the angle of the line dance.

After the bees have instructions for their mission, it's go time. Sometimes the crew brings back so much nectar that they need extra help turning it into honey. So how do honeybees ask for assistance? There's a dance for that, too! It's called the "tremble dance." A bee in need of help takes a slow stroll around the hive, quivering its legs and trembling its body back and forth and side to side. This gets the other bees to hop in and help out.

Dancing isn't the only way honeybees communicate, though. All that shaking and honey-making in a crowded space means that bees bump into one another. When that happens, they vibrate their wings to make a sound, scientists say. It's called the honeybee's "whooping signal." Whoops!