Honeybees have evolved one of nature's most sophisticated communication systems: the waggle dance. Through precise movements, forager bees can communicate the exact location of food sources to their hive mates.
The waggle dance encodes both distance and direction. The angle of the dance relative to vertical indicates direction relative to the sun. The duration of the "waggle" portion indicates distance—roughly one second of waggling per kilometer.
This system, discovered by Karl von Frisch in the 1940s, earned him a Nobel Prize. It demonstrated that invertebrates could possess symbolic communication—once thought unique to humans.