Honey Bee Dance Language

This is an example of the honey bee dance language. I just happened to take a video during one of my old bee science classes at Cal Poly Pomona. This is taken at the observation hive bee lab at UC Riverside. You can hear one of my professors talking in the background. This type of dance shows the distance, and direction of a food source. It could be nectar or in some cases even a water source. A foraging honey bee doing the waggle dance, will wiggle down at a specific angle from up, then walk back up to where she started and wiggle again back down the same degree or angle. In this case she is wiggling up the frame to signify it is closer to the direction of the sun rather than away from the sun (down). Since honey bee combs are vertical, the honey bee (Apis mellifera) uses the up direction (gravity and all) as a reference to the sun or rather where the sun is in relation to the horizon. Then that angle/degree is the degrees away from the azimuth of the sun... where the sun lines up with the horizon (direction of the sun). In addition the time it takes for her to wiggle downward relays the distance it will take to get to what she is "talking" about. She will also allow the smell and taste of what she has sampled to be passed around. So she would be saying there is a food source that smells and tastes like this... and it is 45 degrees away from the direction of the sun, and roughly 2100 meters away. You can actually go out to where the entrance to the observation hive is (other side of the wall) and determine the location of the food source the bees are talking about inside - direction from the sun's azimuth, recorded seconds converted to meters... "ahh those citrus trees across the field." Pretty cool.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Honey
• Bee
• Dance
• Language

[chinesehero8889]

wow, that kind of communication is complex