Well, those last few blog posts were interesting, but a little worrisome. Sounds like this blog post calls for a little fun… maybe some dancing? But not just any dancing—honeybee dancing! Yup, it’s true. Honeybees love to dance, but not just for fun. Scientists have discovered that the little bumblers use dancing as a chief form of communication… who would have thought!?

Imagine that you are a honeybee doing what honeybees do best, looking for nectar. You fly along a willy-nilly path all day, taking no particular direction. You aren’t having too much luck and are thinking about heading in another direction when you come upon a giant meadow of flowers in bloom! Bonanza!! You’ve hit the mother load! Your inner bee programming tells you that you’ve got to get back to the hive pronto to tell the girls all about it (all worker bees are female)! You head for the hive in a straight line—you’ve got no time for poking abut now that there is nectar to be harvested! But once you get there, how do you tell the other bees where to find the honey? The answer is—you dance!

But not just any dance. You perform a special dance called a “waggle dance” that tells the bees where the field is located. How does a bee do a waggle dance? It dances forward, “waggling” its abdomen (middle section) the whole time. Then it circles back and repeats the dance again. The direction the bee dances in tells the others which way they have to travel with respect to the Sun, which bees use just like ancient sailors used the stars to chart their course! Wow! That’s Beee-rilliant!