waggle dance

American  

noun

1. a series of patterned movements performed by a scouting bee, communicating to other bees of the colony the direction and distance of a food source or hive site.

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Example Sentences

Scientists have spent years decoding the honey bee "waggle dance," a highly sophisticated form of communication.

From Science Daily

"The waggle dance is often presented as a one-way information transfer," said Ken Tan, the senior author of the study and a researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

From Science Daily

Using a computer model that replicates known brain circuits in the bee, the researchers showed that fewer than one hundred neurons are needed to integrate this information and recover the angle and the distance to the food being signalled in a waggle dance.

From Science Daily

This enabled them to track the position of the antennae of the surrounding bees in fine detail during each waggle dance -- which are otherwise a blur to the naked human eye.

From Science Daily

Insects are known to be capable of social learning in the wild: the best-known example is the so-called waggle dance used by honeybees to communicate the location and quality of flowers.

From Scientific American