How honeybees give directions by dancing in the dark
30seconds
A honeybee that finds good flowers can tell her sisters where they are, inside a pitch-black hive, by dancing.
She runs in a straight line while shaking her body, loops back and repeats. The angle of that run from straight up equals the angle of the flowers from the sun. The time she spends waggling gives the distance: about 0.4 seconds for 100 metres, and roughly one more second for each extra kilometre.
Radar tracking in 2005 confirmed that recruits really do fly the course the dance describes. In the deep dive, move the sun and the flowers, watch the dance change, then try decoding one yourself.
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