Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.

The waggle dance and the round dance are two forms of dance behaviour that are part of a continuous transition. As the distance between the resource and the hive increases, the round dance transforms into variations of a transitional dance, which, when communicating resources at even greater distances, becomes the waggle dance. In the case of Apis mellifera ligustica, the round dance is performed until the resource is about ten metres (33 ft) away from the hive, transitional dances are performed when the resource is at a distance of twenty to thirty metres (66 to 98 ft) away from the hive, and finally, when it is located at distances greater than forty metres (130 ft) from the hive, the waggle dance is performed. However, even close to the nest, the round dance can contain elements of the waggle dance, such as a waggle portion. It has therefore been suggested that the term waggle dance is better for describing both the waggle dance and the round dance.

Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.

A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase. A worker bee's waggle dance involves running through a small figure-eight pattern: a waggle run (aka waggle phase) followed by a turn to the right to circle back to the starting point (aka return phase), another waggle run, followed by a turn and circle to the left, and so on in a regular alternation between right and left turns after waggle runs. Waggle-dancing bees produce and release two alkanes, tricosane and pentacosane, and two alkenes, (Z)-9-tricosene and (Z)-9-pentacosene, onto their abdomens and into the air.

The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the resource being advertised by the dancing bee. In an experiment with capture and relocation of bees exposed to a waggle dance the bees followed the path that would have taken them to an experimental feeder had they not been displaced. The resource can include the location of a food source or a potential nesting site. For cavity-nesting honey bees, like the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) or Apis nigrocincta, flowers that are located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase. The more excited the bee is about the location, the more rapidly it will waggle, so it will grab the attention of the observing bees, and try to convince them. If multiple bees are doing the waggle dance, it's a competition to convince the observing bees to follow their lead, and competing bees may even disrupt other bees' dances or fight each other off. In addition, some open-air nesting honeybees such as the black dwarf honeybee (Apis andreniformis), whose nests hang from twigs or branches, will perform a horizontal dance on a stage above their nest in order to signal to resources.

Waggle dancing bees that have been in the nest for an extended time adjust the angles of their dances to accommodate the changing direction of the sun. Therefore, bees that follow the waggle run of the dance are still correctly led to the food source even though its angle relative to the sun has changed.

The consumption of ethanol by foraging bees has been shown to reduce waggle dance activity and increase occurrence of the tremble dance.

Kevin Abbott and Reuven Dukas of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada discovered that if a dead western honeybee is placed on a flower, bees performed far fewer waggle dances upon returning to the hive. The scientists explain that the bees associate the dead bee with the presence of a predator at the food source. The reduction of the dance repetition frequency, therefore, indicates that the dancing bees perform and communicate a form of risk/benefit analysis.