Directions, by dance
How a honey bee tells her sisters where the flowers are, in the dark, on a vertical wall of wax.
The waggle dance is a figure-of-eight dance that tells other honey bees the direction and distance to food, water or a new nest site. Wikipedia
Which way?
On the vertical comb, straight up means "towards the sun"; an angle left or right of up means the same angle left or right of the sun. Wikipedia Dancers adjust their angle as the sun moves across the sky. Wikipedia
How far?
Distance is coded in how long the waggle run lasts: the farther the food, the longer the waggle. Wikipedia For food very close to the hive (about 10 m in one Italian honey bee study), bees do a round dance instead, which becomes a waggle dance as distance grows. Wikipedia
A waggle dance can have from one to over 100 circuits. Wikipedia
Dialects and discovery
Different honey bee species have different "dialects" of the dance. Wikipedia
Karl von Frisch was one of the first to work out the meaning of the waggle dance. Wikipedia Karl von Frisch shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about animal behaviour, including the bee dance. Nobel Prize
Try it yourself in the Waggle Dance Decoder: watch a dance, work out the angle from the sun and how long the waggle run lasts, then pick the right flower patch.