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🐝 Honeybee Waggle Dance

A scout bee's figure-eight waggle dance on the vertical comb, transposing solar angle to gravity and encoding distance in run duration.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour2DModerate60 FPS

A scout bee returns from a food source and performs a figure-eight dance on the vertical comb, transposing the sun's compass angle onto gravity and encoding distance in the length of each waggle run.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

The angle of the waggle run from vertical equals the angle between the food source and the sun's azimuth; the run's duration scales with distance. Follower bees decode both from direct contact with the dancer.

🎮 How to Use

Set the food source's compass angle and distance, and the sun's azimuth. Watch the waggle angle and run duration update live, then follow recruited bees as they fly the decoded vector out to the food.

💡 Did You Know?

Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for decoding this dance — one of the few confirmed examples of symbolic, referential communication outside human language.

⚙ Under the hood

A scout bee's figure-eight waggle dance on the vertical comb, transposing the sun's compass angle to gravity and encoding food-source distance in the waggle run's duration.

waggle-dancevon-frischbee-communicationrecruitmententomology

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