The dance language of honey bees is the most remarkable nonhuman communication system known. Von Frisch offered hypotheses regarding both the origin and the subsequent evolution of the dance language. In the context of recent results, we review his hypothesis regarding the origin of the dance: that it arose as a flight-intention movement combined with a few behavioral "artifacts" (apparently functionless behaviors that are probably best viewed as adaptively neutral by-products of otherwise adaptive information processing). An alternative scenario, in which the dance evolved from the bees' cognitive map, seems in many ways more plausible. Among the four species of honey bee and among the races of Apis mellifera, many differences in the dance appear to have adaptive value, casting some light on the later evolution of the dance. In particular, we discuss the roles of sound versus vision in the dances, which appear related to nesting ecology; of the imprecision in distance and direction indication, which appears to be "tuned" to an optimal patch size; and of the various distance dialects, which appear to be consequences of winter stress.