Bees live in colonies called hives. Each colony has one queen bee, few drones (males) and thousands of workers (females). The queen manipulates the behavior of the workers through various pheromones. A successful forager bee communicates information about the source of food discovered by them to the others upon returning home. This they do by means of a round dance or a waggle dance.
During a round dance, the forager runs in small circles clockwise and anticlockwise, alternately. In the case of waggle dance the bee dances tracing a figure of eight. The round dance is performed if the food is far away. The waggle dance is said to convey information on the distance between the colony and the food, the direction in which the food is located and the quantity available. The dancer also carries the smell of the pollen and/or nector that it recently came across.
Thus by this peculiar dance the bees find their way to the sources of food and the way back to the hive. This dance was first found by an Austrian zoologist Karl Von Frisch which got him the Nobel Prize in 1973.
Besides the dance, the bees are also said to have various other ways of remembering their way home. They are said to possess excellent mathematical instinct. They return to their hives by remembering the angles of the triangle formed by the position of the hive, the sun and the bee though this may vary with time. As a result, they cannot spend more than half an hour at their target. When there is no wind they fly high but remember the angles. When the sky is cloudily or when there is a strong wind they fly at low levels remembering a few permanent marks on fields. They can identify almost all different geometrical forms and colours, scent and sound.
According to Frisch, the bees can perceive polarization of sunlight and thus use the sun as a compass. Even on overcast days they do not lose their sense of perception. Its sense of smell is also close to that of humans and they can distinguish all colours except red, it is said.