Honey-bees are famous for their ability to communicate the location of food to their nestmates by dancing on the honeycomb. Using a mixture of behavioural experiments, neural mapping and computational modelling approaches, we have shown how their brain circuits, in particular the central complex, could track location relative to the hive (path integration) and control straight line flight back home. We have also suggested how the food location could be stored and used in interaction with path integration to return directly to the food on subsequent foraging trips. Most recently, we have proposed how this vector memory could be re-expressed in the dance behaviour, transforming a flight vector relative to celestial cues into a waggle trajectory relative to gravity on the vertical honeycomb. By recording the antennal positions of bees following the dance, we have discovered how they detect their relative angle to the dancer and have extended our model of the central complex to explain how followers could thereby acquire the vector that the dancer is signalling. This provides the first plausible account of how honey-bees are able to interpret the dance.​