Honeybees perform a figure-eight dance to tell their hive exactly where to find food.

Biologist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for figuring out how bees talk to each other. He found that the middle part of the dance, called the waggle run, is the most important part. Every 75 milliseconds of waggling tells the other bees the food is about 100 meters away.Bees use the sun as a map. If a bee dances straight up the honeycomb, the food is in the direction of the sun. If she dances at an angle, the other bees know to fly at that same angle away from the sun. They even have an internal clock to track how the sun moves across the sky during the day.Bees measure distance using something called optic flow. This means they track how fast the ground and trees move past their eyes as they fly. A study in the journal Science confirmed that bees use this visual information to calculate travel distance.This system allows bees to find food up to 6 miles away from their home. Other bees in the dark hive follow the dancer by touching her with their antennae. They feel her vibrations and smell the nectar she brought back to understand the message.