Early techniques involved the use of protractors and stopwatches to measure the dance orientation and duration directly from the observation hive. Throughout the last decades, biologists have employed different techniques to measure key characteristics of the waggle dance and decode the information it conveys. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer’s movements and then search for the advertised spots in the field. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource in the field. Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor display. The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication.
