Two scout bees have each found a flower patch and returned to the dark hive to advertise it with a waggle dance — a figure-eight run on the vertical comb that transposes the sun's compass angle onto gravity and encodes distance in how long the buzzing "waggle run" lasts. Nearby follower bees don't see a map; they read the dance directly off the dancer's body, then decide for themselves whether to fly out and check the patch. No single bee compares the two patches — the colony's choice emerges from many small, local decisions adding up.
Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding the waggle dance, and later research on "quorum sensing" in nest-site scouts (by Seeley and others) showed the same cross-inhibition dynamic modelled here also lets swarms of scouts converge on a single new home, not just a single flower patch.
Two scout bees advertise a near patch and a far patch on the same honeycomb, each with a waggle dance whose angle and duration encode that patch's direction and distance — while the whole colony's workforce quietly reallocates toward whichever patch is currently worth more.
Dance vigour — not a spoken vote — is what drives recruitment: the patch with the better quality-for-distance trade-off gets danced more insistently and pulls in more followers, so colony-level foraging allocation emerges from many individual scouts' local signals.
Set nectar quality for the near amber patch and the far violet patch, then watch the waggle-run durations, the recruited-follower counts and the workforce-allocation bar shift. Toggle the flight-cost penalty to see distance start to matter, and raise recruitment sensitivity to make the colony commit harder to a winner.
Real foragers don't just report quality — they discount it by the energetic cost of the round trip, so a mediocre patch next door can out-recruit a richer patch that's much farther away.