Do ants use something similar to the honey bee "waggle dance" to instruct the rest of the colony where to find a food source?
I can only help you on one question about if ants perform a similar communication such as the "waggle-dance" to tell other ants if there is food elsewhere?
Ants will send out scout ants or forages, which will go out in search for food. The ants will lay a pheromone trail, by tapping their abdomen on the ground, like breadcrumbs. If the ant has found a food source, they will taste the food and take part of the food and store it in their crop. The ant will take the food sample and re-trace her trail, making it more detectable when returning to the food source. Once the ant reached the nest and finds another ant, she will regurgitate the food from her crop and position it between her mandibles. She will go towards another ant and exchange the food and pass it on to the ant in a "kissing" motion. This is called trophallaxis, where there is a donor, the scout or forager ant, and a recipient, the ant back at the nest. The ants will then follow the trail the scout first put down and will eventually create a motoway of food going to the nest.
Look up people like Nigel Franks and John Sudd - The behavioural ecology of ants.
The lives of ants - Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon
The Earth dwellers - Erich Hoyt
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003347295801405 about trophallaxis in solenopsis ants sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/037663578290050X about trophallaxis in Myrmica ruba 
Hope that helps.