Dancing is a well-proven form of communication—just think of the volumes spoken by a Shakira video. Whether it’s the fight scene in "West Side Story" or the dying scene in "Swan Lake," dance is all about telling a story through movement. We humans think we’re pretty smart to come up with this unique form of expression, but once again we’ve been scooped by Mother Nature. Animals were shaking their groove thangs eons before humans started doing the Watusi. Birds, reptiles and mammals all have a step or two that they use to seduce a mate or confront a rival, but it’s the honey bees that are the Solid Gold dancers of this disco ball we call Earth.

Honey bees are truly marvels of cooperative living. A hive is made up of a queen, 20,000 to 80,000 female worker bees, and a relatively small number of male bees, called drones. The all-female working class is made up of hive-based bees, scouts and foragers. Scouts find the resources, foragers collect them. Only female bees do the dancing. It’s like Ladies Night every night in a bee hive. The drones just stand around the hive and watch the chicks dance with each other. Scout and foraging bees are looking for four things in the world: nectar, pollen, water, and propolis (plant sap). The dances communicate the details of collecting and transporting vital hive resources.

Bees basically have four dance moves. The first is the Dorsal-Ventral Abdominal Vibrations Dance, or DVAV, used when foraging conditions are good. It consists of a bee placing its legs on the back of another bee and vibrating its wings to recruit others to go collect food. This move was portrayed well in the Gap ads that featured handsy dancers jitterbugging to the sound of Brian Setzer’s Big Band. The bees use jumpin’ and jivin’ to get others excited about getting to work.

Another dance of Apis mellifera (the common honeybee) is the tremble dance. This dance gets hive-based bees to take nectar and water from the foraging bees. It’s sort of like truckers asking the dock workers to unload their trucks. To perform the tremble dance, a bee walks throughout the hive and shakes her body with her front legs held aloft, like Beyonce doing her famous Booty Shake. It works like magic.

The next dance step that a scout bee must master is the round dance, used when the source of the food is less than 100 yards away from the hive. This dance doesn’t indicate the direction of the food source, it merely lets the other bees know that food is close by and that they should go get it. The dancer dances in a circle, then reverses herself and dances the circle in the opposite direction. She repeats this several times and hands out samples of the nectar to the other bees so they will know exactly what they are seeking. If the dancing scout has found pollen, the other bees watching the dance will smell the pollen on her legs. The best pop culture example of this kind of dancing are the two-step dances performed in “Urban Cowboy” (Travolta and Winger) and “Hope Floats” (Bullock and Connick Jr.)—although bees would never be caught dead in plaid shirts and bolo ties.

The final dance is the real tricky one, and it’s the one that made the bee famous as a dancer in the animal world. Known as the waggle dance, it was deciphered in the mid-20th century by an Austrian zoologist named Karl Von Frisch (he even won the Nobel Peace Prize for his bee work, though why he did not rename the bee dance the Frisch Swish, no one knows). To do a waggle dance, the bee moves in sort of a squashed figure eight pattern. She dances a straight line, makes a wide circle to the right, dances a straight line again, and then does a wide circle to the left. Another way to visualize the route is a capital letter D and then a backwards D. The waggle dance tells the other bees how far away the food source is and its direction. The direction of the straight line portion of the dance communicates the angle the bees must maintain to the sun. So, through the waggle dance, a scout is able to communicate the angle between the food source, the hive and the sun. Also, the slower the bee dances, the farther away the patch is. So a slow Barry White “Soul Train” groove means the bees have a long haul ahead of them.

Clearly the waggle dance is the most difficult hoofing a bee will have to do. A waggle-dancing bee is like Fred Astaire dancing in “Swing Time,” Baryshnikov performing in “Giselle,” or Savion Glover tapping in “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk.” It’s so complex that scientists only understand parts of the dance. Some aspects are still a mystery. A study conducted in 2003 measured the BO of dancing bees in the hive and determined dancers that “get down” emit four distinct aromatic chemicals, a bee’s version of Chanel No. 5. The effect of the perfume is unknown. Sound may be important, too. A dancing bee will buzz during the waggle, and some scientists believe that provides more data about direction. It’s also possible that she just feels stupid dancing without music.

One study that should be conducted is the interpretation of human dances by bees. What would a bee make of Kevin Bacon’s seizure-like dancing in “Footloose,” or Jennifer Beal’s piston-legged workouts in “Flashdance”? A bee would surely just sting the Lord of the Dance. And a bee would have known that the wrong couple won ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” contest. Perhaps FOX should include a bee on the judging panel of their new dance contest, “So You Think You Can Dance” (Wednesdays at 8 p.m.). Certainly no other creature has had more dance experience.