Round dance (honey bee)
A round dance is the communicative behaviour of a foraging honey bee (Apis mellifera), in which it moves on the comb in close circles, alternating right and then left. It was previously believed that the round dance indicates that the forager has located a profitable food source close to the hive and the round dance transitions into the waggle dance when food sources are more than 50 meters (160 ft) away. Recent research shows that bees have only one dance that always encodes distance and direction to the food source, but that precision and expression of this information depends on the distance to the target; therefore, the use of "round dance" is outdated. Elements of the round dance also provide information regarding the forager's subjective evaluation of the food source's profitability.Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first ethologists to investigate both the waggle dance and round dance through his studies examining honey bee foraging behaviours, and is credited with translating many of their underlying mechanisms.