Since Karl von Frisch decoded the dance language of the honey bee, it has been accepted that the waggle dance communicates distant food sources while dancers announcing resources close to the nest use the round dance. In addition, it is thought that the waggle dance contains information about the direction to the food source, while the round dance does not. Hence, these two dances are usually considered separate entities, two “words” in the bees’ language. Recent work suggests that round dances may contain some directional information, blurring the line between the two. We trained honey bees to feeders at varying distances from the hive and recorded their corresponding dances. For every dance, the following components were transcribed: (1) form and pattern of dancer movement during a circuit, (2) waggle phase duration, (3) the angular orientation of individual waggle phases, and (4) the divergence angle (the angle between the directions of sequential waggle phases). Our data suggest that directional information may be encoded in the round dance the same way as it is in the waggle dance: the direction of the waggle runs indicates the food source with relation to the azimuth of the sun. However, there is more ‘noise’ in the directional information of the round dance. This study represents the first detailed investigation of the changes in dance patterns as the distance to the food source increases, and we suggest that round and waggle dances are part of a continuum rather than two distinct forms of communication.