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Nature 419, 885-886 (31 October 2002) | doi:10.1038/419885a

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Animal behaviour: When it pays to waggle

Fred C. Dyer

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The waggling dance of honeybees conveys navigational information about where food is to be found. But it seems that the information is valuable only in certain circumstances.

Almost 60 years ago, Karl von Frisch discovered that worker honeybees, after returning home from rich sources of nectar or pollen, can encode the direction and distance of food sources into body movements that he called dances1 (Fig. 1).