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What's a bee to do? One possibility is to encrypt your directions. Instead of setting out an odor that broadcasts "Tasty morsel here!," whisper your findings only to those for whom the message is intended: your nest mates. In other words, evolve a symbolic language with which you can convey what you know to others in the privacy of the hive, without fear of being overheard. Nieh suggests that the famous dance language of the honeybee, and its counterparts in a few other species, evolved under pressure to hide indications of the location of rich food sources from any competitor bees in the area. Ideally, of course, one would have a code able to be read only by the members of one's own colony, but that degree of encryption seems to be beyond the bees, and so they have had to settle with having species-specific, or at least population-specific, signals. Combined with the other advantages of such communication to a flying rather than walking insect, for example, the inability to carry other workers and the inconvenience of odor trails over long distances, the dance doesn't seem like an anomaly, but like an obvious solution to a problem.

Ants and bees differ in a few other respects: ants are much slower than bees at redirecting their efforts to a newly introduced rich food source, and the members of an ant colony act almost like neurons in the brain when responding to stimulation. Ants also exhibit something called stigmergy, which sounds like either an eighties band or what happens when the recipients of social stigma gather in groups, for example, smokers outside a building, but is the way that the ants coordinate each other's movements by changing the odor trails that convey activity patterns. This too means that the ants can make decisions without resorting to the direct exchange of information among individuals.

Bee Spoke

REGARDLESS of the waggle dance's evolutionary origin, the idea that bees could possess a symbolic language has never been simply relegated to an incidental by-product of their flying existence, a serendipity of evolution. Anthropologists endlessly debate whether it is possible to have thinking without language, whether one has to be able to formulate thoughts into something resembling words to be truly sentient. And they take enormous pains to define what makes our language special, and how it can be the one holdout in making humans different from all other animals. But the bees make us ask instead whether it is possible to have language without thinking, since even the most ardent admirers of the waggle dance do not maintain that the bees' cognitive capacities mirror our own. So do the bees speak? And if so, does it mean we have to admit them into a special club, unlike any other animal?

Although many beekeepers had noticed that single foraging bees seem to advertise the location of nectar-rich patches of flowers to the rest of the hive, the first detailed description of the forager's performance was made in 1919 by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with the ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen for his accomplishment. He was able to carefully track the movements of individual bees by placing his colonies in glass-walled observation hives and marking the bees with either dabs of paint or tiny numbered circles that he glued to their backs.

Von Frisch noted that when a worker bee returned to the hive after visiting a rich food source, she performed a stereotyped series of movements on the surface of the honeycomb. If the food source is close by, less than 50 yards or so, she did a rather simple "round dance," in which the forager runs in narrow circles. More distant food patches warranted a "waggle dance," which contains information about both the distance of the food from the hive and the direction in which it lies. The waggle dance consists of a straight run followed by a semicircle first to one side and then another, in a rough figure eight, with the bee waggling