waggle

Waggle is a verb meaning to move or shake with quick, short motions from side to side or up and down. It describes human, animal, or mechanical movements, and is used in zoology to refer to certain communication behaviors, most notably the waggle dance of honeybees.

The waggle dance is performed by worker honeybees (Apis) inside the hive. It features a straight-run wagging phase followed by a circular return. The angle of the straight run relative to vertical encodes the direction of a distant food source relative to the sun; the duration of the waggle phase encodes distance. The dance recruits nest mates and is influenced by resource quality and colony needs. After the waggle phase, bees often complete the communication with a return phase in which they circle to finish the movement. There is also a shorter round dance used for nearby sources that conveys less precise directional information.

The honeybee waggle dance was described by Karl von Frisch, whose work on bee communication led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 (shared with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen). The waggle dance is a key example in the study of animal communication and recruitment, illustrating how a colony coordinates foraging through multisensory cues and social learning.