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Waggle Dance Forager

Interactive honeybee waggle-dance simulator: a scout's dance-floor run angle (relative to gravity, standing in for the sun's bearing) and duration (~1s per km) recruit nestmates who fly out and forage, driving the colony to converge on the richest source.

Ecology & Conservation Biology2DEasy60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

Honeybee scouts recruit nestmates to good food sources with the waggle dance: a straight run across the vertical comb whose angle from "up" encodes the source's bearing relative to the sun, and whose duration — about one second per kilometre — encodes its distance. This simulation splits the hive dance floor (left) from the outdoor foraging field (right): watch a scout dance for a discovered source, followers decode the run with some natural error, and recruits fly out along the decoded vector to search near the real location. Successful foragers return and dance in turn, so richer, closer sources accumulate more dances and more recruits, and the whole colony's foraging effort converges on the best patch without anyone deciding centrally.

⚙ Under the hood

Discover how scout bees use their waggle dance to communicate the location of food sources. Adjust the angle and duration to see which direction and distance the colony should explore.

beekeepingforagingcommunication

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install