page_title: Round dance (honey bee)
section_title: Position of the sun
hierarchical_section_title: Round dance (honey bee) / Mechanism / Position of the sun
context_page_description: A round dance is the communicative behaviour of a foraging honey bee, in which she moves on the comb in close circles, alternating right and then left. It is previously believed that the round dance indicates that the forager has located a profitable food source close to the hive and the round dance transitions into the waggle dance when food sources are more than 50 meters away. Recent research shows that bees have only one dance that always encodes distance and direction to the food source, but that precision and expression of this information depends on the distance to the target; therefore, the use of "round dance" is outdated. Elements of the round dance also provide information regarding the forager's subjective evaluation of the food source's profitability.
  Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first ethologists to investigate both the waggle dance and round dance through his studies examining honey bee foraging behaviours, and is credited with translating many of their underlying mechanisms.
context_section_description: The round dance uses the position of the sun in order to indicate the direction of the food source in the same way that the waggle dance does. On the vertical surface of the comb, the forager expresses the angle between the position of the sun and the path to the food source through an angular deflection from perfect vertical. Honey bees use both the position of the sun and the polarization patterns of a blue sky to communicate the direction to the food source. Support for this theory rests in the observation that honey bees can still recognize the sun's position when it is obscured by a cloud or a mountain, for example. Honey bees also recognize the daily movements of the sun and can use the sun as a compass by calculating the hour of the day.
caption: The round dance uses the position of the sun to indicate the direction from the hive to the food source in the same way that the waggle dance does