Solution to Follow the Bees!

The purpose of the waggle dance is to direct other bees to sources of nectar. In the waggle dance, a bee walks in a figure­8 and “waggles” in the center. The angle of the waggle relative to up is equal to the angle of the source relative to the position of the sun. The distance of the walk is proportional to distance of the source away from the hive. Even when it is night, bees can still infer the position of the sun and perform the waggle dance.

In this puzzle, each of the bee’s waggle dance points to a particular location with food on campus (cafes, cafeterias, restaurants, convenience stores) relative to the Green building. The orientations of the waggle dances change with the position of the sun (reloading the page at a different time of day will change their orientation). As an additional hint that the puzzle requires the solver to look at the real-time location of the sun, the sky color behind the Green Building changes to reflect the time of day. The solver might also look at the JavaScript source and see that the angle information is automatically reloaded once per minute. (This is also a convenient way for the solver to obtain the accurate angle and distance parameters of the bees.)

From highest to lowest floor, colors refer to the lines in the map below:

1) Forbes cafe (Stata)
2) Cafe 4 (bldg 4)
3) Thirsty Ear (Ashdown)
4) Maseeh dining hall
5) Muddy Charles (Walker)
6) MacGregor Convenience
7) Bosworth Cafe (bldg 7)
8) 100 Main (bldg E62)

At each location can be found a picture of a type of flower. Puzzle hunters need to index into the flower’s name based on the location of the window (from left to right) on which the bee is doing the waggle dance.

1) Buttercup
2) rosE
3) suNflower
4) azalEa
5) daFfodil
6) daIsy
7) Chrysanthemum
8) honEysuckle

Reading from the highest floor to the lowest floor, the answer is BENEFICE.