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Watch the dance floor
The forager with the green paint dot is dancing. In the straight run she waggles her body from side to side, and that run carries the message. Its angle from straight up is the angle between the sun and the flowers. How long it lasts tells the distance. Then she loops back, once to the left and once to the right, and runs it again. Read her, click the map where you think the flowers are, and send a scout.
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Move over the map for a bearing and distance from the hive.
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Left and right arrow keys walk to other days, and N brings in the next dancer. Every day is a different hive.
The sun in the hive
It is dark inside a hive, and the dancer can't see the sun. She dances against gravity, and every bee that follows her knows that up means the sun's bearing. The sun keeps moving, though, so a forager who goes back to the same flowers all day has to turn her dance with it: about as far as the sun moves, and fastest around noon. Drag the time of day or run the day, and watch the dances turn.
- Hive
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- Date
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- Sun's declination
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- Sunrise to sunset
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- Sun now
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- Sun is turning
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- This colony's distance code
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- Foraging force
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Where the colony is working
No bee compares one patch of flowers with another. A forager coming back from a rich patch dances longer and harder than one coming back from a poor one. More of the bees waiting to go out follow her, and within a couple of hours most of the workforce has shifted to the better flowers, though not one bee made that decision. Here is today's colony working through the day, patch by patch. You can't see what a patch is until you have read its dance.
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What is real here and what is not
The dance language is real, and so is the sun. The hive and the country around it are made up.
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01
The code is real
Karl von Frisch worked it out in the 1940s and shared a Nobel prize for it in 1973. The angle of the waggle run from straight up is the angle of the food from the sun, measured clockwise. The length of the run grows with distance. For flowers right beside the hive the dancer just circles, and that round dance says little more than “near”.
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The sun is real
The sun's bearing and height come from the standard formulas for the declination and hour angle, at this hive's latitude, for the actual date. Clock time here is local solar time, so the sun is due south at noon. Leave the dancer alone for an hour and her runs turn to follow it, as real foragers' do.
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03
The scatter is real
A real dancer doesn't repeat herself exactly. Her runs spread either side of the true direction, and they spread wider for nearby flowers than for distant ones. Her followers average the runs, and that's why you get a notebook. The spread here is about the right size, though the exact figures are invented.
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04
The distance code is approximate
A bee doesn't measure metres. She measures how much of the world has slid past her eyes on the way out. So published figures for how far one second of waggling means vary between colonies and landscapes, from roughly three quarters of a kilometre to well over one. Each day's colony gets its own figure from inside that range, and it is shown above. Real runs also have a small offset that isn't modelled here.
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05
The colony is a sketch
The flowers are ones bees really work in that month, but the hours they give nectar and how rewarding they are have been rounded off. The chart of where the foragers go is a simple model of recruitment and abandonment, in the spirit of Thomas Seeley's experiments with feeders. It is not a record of any real hive. The comb, the fields, the village and the river are all invented.
Twenty-seven rooms and the number is still the only thing doing any work. Here it plants a hedge, digs a river, settles when the lime trees give nectar and which side of the village the ivy grows on. Then it hands the news to an insect, who passes it on in a language nobody on this site ever wrote down.