Waggle dance in the context of Natural speech

A natural language or ordinary language is any spoken language or signed language used organically in a human community, first emerging without conscious premeditation and subject to: replication across generations of people in the community, regional expansion or contraction, and gradual internal and structural changes. The vast majority of languages in the world are natural languages. As a category, natural language includes both standard dialects (ones with high social prestige) as well as nonstandard or vernacular dialects. Even an official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the Académie Française, is still classified as a natural language (e.g. in the field of natural language processing), as its prescriptive aspects do not make it regulated enough to be considered a constructed or controlled natural language. Linguists broadly consider writing to be a static visual representation of a particular natural language, though, in many cases in highly literate modern societies, writing itself can also be considered natural language.

Excluded from the definition of natural language are: artificial and constructed languages, such as those developed for works of fiction; languages of formal logic, such as those in computer programming; and non-human communication systems in nature, such as whale vocalizations or honey bees' waggle dance. The academic consensus is that particular key features prevent animal communication systems from being classified as languages at all. Certain human communication or linguistic systems with no native speakers, as sometimes used in cross-cultural contexts, are also not natural languages.

Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

The western honey bee or European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most common of the 7–12 species of honey bees worldwide. The genus name Apis is Latin for 'bee', and mellifera is the Latin for 'honey-bearing' or 'honey-carrying', referring to the species' production of honey.

Like all honey bee species, the western honey bee is eusocial, creating colonies with a single fertile female (or "queen"), many normally non-reproductive females or "workers", and a small proportion of fertile males or "drones". Individual colonies can house tens of thousands of bees. Colony activities are organized by complex communication between individuals, through both pheromones and the waggle dance.

A round dance is the communicative behaviour of a foraging honey bee (Apis mellifera), in which it moves on the comb in close circles, alternating right and then left. It was previously believed that the round dance indicates that the forager has located a profitable food source close to the hive and the round dance transitions into the waggle dance when food sources are more than 50 meters (160 ft) away. Recent research shows that bees have only one dance that always encodes distance and direction to the food source, but that precision and expression of this information depends on the distance to the target; therefore, the use of "round dance" is outdated. Elements of the round dance also provide information regarding the forager's subjective evaluation of the food source's profitability.

Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first ethologists to investigate both the waggle dance and round dance through his studies examining honey bee foraging behaviours, and is credited with translating many of their underlying mechanisms.

Karl Ritter von Frisch, ForMemRS (20 November 1886 – 12 June 1982) was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.

His work centered on investigations of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and he was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance. His theory, described in his 1927 book Aus dem Leben der Bienen (translated into English as The Dancing Bees), was disputed by other scientists and greeted with skepticism at the time. Only much later was it shown to be an accurate theoretical analysis.

Bee learning and communication includes cognitive and sensory processes in all kinds of bees, that is the insects in the seven families making up the clade Anthophila. Some species have been studied more extensively than others, in particular Apis mellifera, or European honey bee. Color learning has also been studied in bumblebees.

Honey bees are sensitive to odors (including pheromones), tastes, and colors, including ultraviolet. They can demonstrate capabilities such as color discrimination through classical and operant conditioning and retain this information for several days at least; they communicate the location and nature of sources of food; they adjust their foraging to the times at which food is available; they may even form cognitive maps of their surroundings. They also communicate with each other by means of a "waggle dance" and in other ways.