Which animal talks by dancing?

If you (very carefully) look inside a bee hive, you’ll see a buzzing nest of activity. Bees are constantly on the move, performing all the jobs that need to be done to keep the hive running, but every so often you can spot a group of bees standing in a circle watching another bee dance. This is actually a conversation!

Bees don’t hear the way we do, so they can’t talk to each other. Instead they have two ways of communicating: through smells (like a warning smell that says “Danger!”), and through dances.

The most famous dance that bees use is the waggle dance. This is the dance that tells other bees where to find food. When a bee who has made a successful trip to a flower returns to the hive, she will turn in one direction, which tells the bees watching her which direction to fly in. Then she waggles her whole abdomen. The number of times she waggles tels the bees how far to go!

The waggle dance is performed in a figure-eight, but there is also a simpler round dance that tells the bees there is food close to the hive. For this dance, the bee just turns in a circle.

If a bee climbs on top of another bee and vibrates very quickly, she is doing the “hurry up!” dance. This tells the bee on the bottom that she needs to stop standing there and do some work.

Sometimes you might see a bee staggering around as though she is drunk, and then stopping to spread her wings. This is the “clean me” dance. If another bee sees it, she will come along and lick the dancing bee clean!