How does a scout honeybee tell her hive-mates the direction and distance of a newly found food source?
- By releasing a pheromone trail from the food back to the hive
- By buzzing at a pitch that rises the farther away the food is
- By performing a figure-eight 'waggle dance' whose angle and duration encode direction and distance
- By leading a small group of bees directly to the site and back
Why C? And why not the others?
Correct answer: C. By performing a figure-eight 'waggle dance' whose angle and duration encode direction and distance
Karl von Frisch's Nobel Prize-winning research showed that a returning scout bee performs a waggle dance on the vertical honeycomb: the angle of the waggling run relative to straight up encodes the food source's direction relative to the sun, while the duration of the waggle encodes its distance, with nearby bees decoding the message in total darkness purely through touch and vibration. Pheromone trails are how ants, not bees, typically mark a path to food for their nestmates to follow. A rising buzz pitch is not how honeybees signal distance; the coded cue is the length of the waggling run, not any change in sound frequency. Some other social insects do physically lead nestmates to a food site in a behavior called tandem running, but honeybees instead rely on this symbolic in-hive dance rather than direct escort.
Source: Karl von Frisch, 'The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees,' Harvard University Press, 1967; Smithsonian Institution.