Why do bees dance to tell other bees where food is?

Worker honeybees perform a waggle dance on the hive comb to share information about profitable flowers. The duration of the waggle run helps indicate distance, while the angle of the run relative to gravity tells nestmates the direction relative to the Sun. This was famously explained by Karl von Frisch, who received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on bee communication. The dance is one of the best-known examples of symbolic communication in nonhuman animals and helps colonies efficiently exploit scattered food sources.