In 1973 Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for decoding the "dance language" of honeybees. A scout who finds food returns to the dark hive and performs a figure-eight dance on the vertical comb: a straight, buzzing waggle run followed by a loop back to the start, alternating sides. Because the hive interior is dark, the bee cannot point at the sun directly — instead it transposes the solar angle onto gravity, using "straight up" on the comb as a stand-in for "toward the sun."
Karl von Frisch's discovery, later confirmed with robot bees and radar tracking by Riley et al. (2005), remains one of the only known cases of true symbolic communication — an abstract, learned reference to a location — outside of human language.
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.
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.
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.
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.