Why You Should Be More Like a Bee

Bees and their waggle dance and what it means for you

Photo by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash

When honeybees find food, water or new nest sources, they need to communicate this information back to other colony members. Unlike humans, bees can’t talk, so they perform a waggle dance which communicates information to other bees. The duration and direction of the waggle dance communicate the direction and distance.

Not all bees follow the waggle dance

When other honeybees see the waggle dance, they learn about a food source and then almost all the honeybees go to the food source. I say almost all because 1/5th or 20% of the honeybees instead decide they don’t want to follow the waggle dance and instead go in a different direction altogether.

Why?

These rogue bees are an important part of the colony’s strategy — if the food source is a local maximum, the colony wants to ‘hedge’ its bets and keep exploring other food sources. Usually finding the local maximum is a ‘good enough’ strategy.

For example in Hong Kong, each street is devoted to selling one particular type of item — there’s a street for men’s clothing, a street for women’s clothing, etc. If you want to buy a particular item, you walk down the street and haggle with the vendors (because…