London, May 12: One of the most enduring disputes in the world of dance has been solved by scientists in research published today.

Long before Strictly Dance Fever, bees apparently strutted their stuff to tell other hive members the whereabouts of nectar and pollen.

The “waggle dance”, a code that shows the distance and direction of newly-discovered food, was first described by the zoologist Karl von Frisch. After some dispute, this discovery would earn him a Nobel prize in 1973.

He believed other bees who observed this dance (recruits) could “read” the code to fly directly to food. But recruits always seemed to take much longer to arrive than expected if they flew directly.

Despite this, von Frisch’s ideas were backed by indirect experiments carried out by scientists who used dancing robot bees, manipulated dances and made bees fly through patterned tunnels.

Nevertheless some scientists were unconvinced, most notably Adrian Wenner, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Today, in the journal Nature, a team at Rothamsted Research, in Harpenden, Herts, shows that von Frisch was correct by revealing the precision of the instructions in the dance using radar to record the actual flight paths of bees in the field.

Joe Riley, Alan Smith and colleagues in Rothamsted and Germany watched the waggle dance by a scout bee in a glass-fronted hive and observed the recruits. They captured recruits as they left the hive, attached a thin wire radar transponder, then recorded their flight paths using radar. After looping flights, while bees find their bearings, “they fly pretty much as the waggle dance predicts,” said Smith.

Most recruited bees undertook a flight path that took them straight to the vicinity of the feeding site ? on average within five yards over a distance of 200 yards ? where they then located its exact position by sight and smell.