The Bee Dance And Its Secret Language
What is the bee dance? How honey bees locate food is a question that has fascinated naturalists for centuries; in fact, communication between many animals is still largely a secret for ethologists today.
Only relatively recently has the bee dance been discovered, a complex system of communication that occurs through the movements of the body. Read on to learn more about this curious and sophisticated behavior.
The dance of bees: the secret language
Honey bees ( Apis mellifera ) are insects with a complex social structure. Living in hives, they feed on the nectar of flowers available in nature; consequently, they play a fundamental role in the pollination of ecosystems and the maintenance of flora.
What we know as the “bee dance” is a complex communication system available to worker bees to transmit to the rest of the honeycomb the direction and distance of the flowers they discover during their research. This result is achieved through a series of movements and “wiggling” of the abdomen.
The dance itself is based on two principles: angle and duration. The angle indicates the direction in which the food is in relation to the sun, while the duration of the dance indicates the distance. In the next paragraph we will deepen these concepts.
Types of bee dance
Broadly speaking, there are two types of bee dance: the circular dance and the abdomen dance. When a food source is within 50 meters of the worker bee, the worker performs a circular dance. Its duration indicates the distance that separates it from the food source, without however indicating the direction.
The belly dance takes place when the source of food found by the bee is more than 150 meters away. The worker bee that performs it flies in a straight line and returns in a semicircle to the starting point and then performs an opposite and symmetrical movement.
While performing the bottom movement, the bee’s body wiggles from side to side. At the same time, it emits low-frequency sound. The distance of the moment of the flounder indicates approximately the distance that separates it from the flowers.
The angle indicates the direction
As we have seen, the representation of the distance at which the flowers are located is quite simple. However, understanding how bees communicate where food is going is a more complex phenomenon.
The bees use the honeycomb as if it were a map, in order to represent the surroundings of the hive. The angle adopted by the bee in relation to the vertical of the honeycomb is the key element. If the bee wishes to signal that the flowers are in the direction of the sun, it will perform part of the flounder in the direction of the honeycomb ceiling and vice versa.
If the direction is represented by a specific angle (such as, for example, 60 degrees west of the sun), the bee will make this angle relative to the vertical. Thus, these winged insects learn the direction in which their food sources are located thanks to a relatively complex dance.
A patient and intermittent search
This system was discovered by the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch, a famous researcher specializing in these insects who began working in the 1930s. However, after the Nazi party came to power in Germany, he was dismissed from his posts because he was of Jewish descent.
However, following a serious epidemic that struck the hives in Bavaria, he was called to try to stop it, which allowed him to resume his research. Finally, after strenuous efforts, he was able to demonstrate this mechanism, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1973.
Can we communicate with bees?
Now that we have discovered how the bee dance works, we are able to explore some possibilities that open up before us. One of them is to communicate with honey bees or, in other words, to imitate their dance to find out if they can interpret it correctly.
A group of Harvard University researchers began working with RoboBee, a small insect-shaped robot.
Thanks to its small size and versatility, this device is very useful for collecting environmental data; in this case it was used to analyze animal behavior. RoboBee was introduced to a beehive, where he imitated the dance we now know too.
As the researchers expected, a group of bees appeared in the very place indicated by the dance. Ultimately, as we can see, technology allows us to learn a lot about animals, and even to communicate with them.
