Bees are definitely one of the hardest workers on the planet, with ants being their only close competitors. Bees are social insects, having a hierarchical family group. At the top is the queen and the bottom most are workers who bring in honey to feed the ever growing family. Drones, whose only job is to fertilize the eggs that the queen lays (she actually lays a lot), and larvae in various stages of maturity are the other occupants of the beehive. But why do bees buzz and wiggle around so much, wasting their energy, as if the energy spent on finding and bringing honey wasn’t tiring enough? Well if you have keenly observed bees hard at work, you would realize that all that wiggling and buzzing is their way of communicating with each other. Yes they dance and buzz to convey to their fellow bees the location of a food source In case you never got to observe bees, then let’s do a bit of eavesdropping and find what they do. Make no noise! You don’t want to anger them and get stung.
Get down on the Dance floor
So lets follow the scout bee who is just entering the hive, he seems to be really happy and dancing in a particular way. Well the dance floor is usually near the entrance, but in winters it may move more inside the hive and in real hot climate they use the area outside the hive as dance floor. Since natural hives hang vertically, the dance is also on vertical plane and the bee has to tell a route that’s horizontal, that requires lots of sense of direction and distance (I am already wondering which plane is horizontal and which is vertical). When the dance is outside the hive (or in artificially constructed honey combs), it is generally done on a horizontal plane.
The Round dance
The bee that just entered is making vertical circles. Hey!!! See that he has suddenly reversed direction and is making a circle again. There are so many rapt observers (other bees I mean) besides us.
Let me translate it for you. Circles mean the food is nearby not more then 100 meters away. Having received the good news, the other bees, all fly away in all directions and search within 100 metres radius (hard work), but an experienced bee, using the odour given out by our scout, directly flies to the flower referred to by the scout’s odour (smart work).The tail-waggle dance
Ohh, we have another arrival! The poor creature looks so tired, but excited nevertheless. So he is taking to the dance floor as well, meaning he too has found food. His moves are different though. Look! He is making a straight run and wagging and buzzing rhythmically (thought to be describing food quality and quantity);turning to left, making a semicircle, back to where he started; he is doing the straight run again, but look, now he is turning right and making a semicircle; making a near 8 figure each time. Some of them have joined in his dance. And the spectators have taken off, so sure of where they are headed. However strange this looks to you, it’s the most ingenious way of conveying the direction and the distance of the food (considering that they can’t speak as we do).
Well, tail waggling dance is performed when food is more than 100 meters away. It uses the angle of sunlight (or partially polarized light*- implies they can convey direction even when the sun isn’t directly visible, say as on a cloudy day or when sun is setting behind a mountain) to describe the direction and number of eights to describe the distance. Bees must be having the most accurate sense of time (since sun and its rays change position as the day progresses; also consider that he has to correct for its position from the time he found food to the time that has lapsed till his dance performance).With increase in distance the number of 8s per unit time decreases and the length and duration increases. So if for a food source 100 meters away the bee makes 10 eights in 15 seconds, for 3km it will make one stately 8 in the same time. Waggle part or the straight run is what conveys the direction. A straight vertical run upwards means the food is towards the direction of sun, downwards implies away from sun. If it is say 30 degrees to sun rays angle, then the run will be at an angle of 30 degrees to the vertical.
Courtesy: www.answersingenesis.org, www.theevidence.orgOn days when the dance floor is shifted to the outside the sun itself may be used as reference. Sometimes even the onlookers join in the dance, learning the moves they are actually by-hearting the location.
This language of the bees was first deciphered and translated for us by Karl von Frisch when World War II was on in full swing (when people were decoding other stuff). He understood the bee language so well that he could tell his neighbors the exact distance and location of a flower from which the bees in his side were feasting upon. That’s some marvelous decoding Mr. Frisch! In fact he made artificial honey combs, exposed the bees to artificial polarized light and studied their dances out and out. But that’s not all to it, the dialect and the accent of the bees varies with regions. For e.g. An Austrian bee (von Frisch worked on these) does round dance for a distance up to 100meters, but an Italian bee shifts to tail-waggle after 80meters. So if you made an Italian honeybee talk to an Austrian one, you would most probably end up confusing the Austrian. The bee language is no less complicated than ours but nevertheless well structured to be precise every single time as if a GPS was inside their head.
* Tie a rope to a pole at one end, stretch it to its length and pluck it. It forms ripples in only one direction, the direction along which it was plucked. Similarly polarized light waves also vibrate only in one direction (light waves are polarized by polarizer and also by scattering). Sunrays get scattered by molecules in atmosphere and become partially polarized. Although the amount is going to vary with region and the sun’s location in the sky, the pattern is very much predictable. And it’s these patterns that the bees recognize and use for their communication.
Reference:
Bionics,Vincent Marteka;Lippincot, 1965
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