What a waggle dance is actually saying

A returning forager who has found something worth recruiting for dances on the vertical face of the comb, in the dark, where no bee can see the sun. The angle of her run from straight-up encodes the food’s bearing relative to the sun; the duration of the run encodes roughly how far. It is one of the few animal communication systems that has been fully decoded, and it still undersells how strange it is that it works.