When a honeybee finds a rich patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs a waggle dance on the vertical comb. The angle of the dance relative to gravity encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun, and the duration of the waggle encodes the distance. Remarkably, bees adjust the angle over the course of the day as the sun moves, even when dancing inside a dark hive. The dance is not a fixed instinct alone: young bees follow experienced dancers more accurately over time, and colonies deprived of experienced dancers communicate measurably worse, suggesting a learned component layered on the innate behaviour.