In this article we will look at how bees communicate with each other. Bees make lots of sounds. They hum, buzz, squeak and flap their wings. But at the same time, most scientists believe that bees are completely deaf. They have not found any organs that remotely resemble a hearing apparatus. Other insects do have such an organ. The grasshopper has one on its leg and the locust has one on its abdomen.
Probably, bees can perceive sound waves in some other way, by some organs that we do not know about. Otherwise, how can we explain that young swarming queens in one hive, not only ‘pipe’, making sounds similar to quacking and tapping, but also echo, as, for example, roosters do.
Bees communicating through “dance”
Scientists have noticed that after finding nectar and returning to the hive, worker bees make quick round and gradual movements. This is how they show other bees the way to the nectar source they have found. At the same time, they also ‘wiggle’ their abdomens. That’s why scientists called it the ‘dance’ of bees. At the end of the dance, the bee leaves the hive and flies again to the source of nectar. But she does not take with her the bees that were near her during the dance. The bees only after some time and alone fly out into the field and unmistakably find their prey.
The basic principle of dance was discovered by Carl von Frisch, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioural patterns.
There are two types of this dance – round and wagging. But not only the type of dance is important, but also its tempo (speed of movements).
Round dance
The scout bee performs a round dance if it has found a food source relatively close to the hive (not more than 100 metres). In this case it first makes a circle in one direction, then turns and makes a circle in the other direction.
The round dance gives no indication of direction at all, but always says that the food source should be sought close to the hive, at a distance of no more than 50 – 100 metres. It is not difficult to see that no particular precision is required here. The bees from the hive can fly around the apiary and find food just by looking around.
Wiggle dance
In the wiggle dance, the bee describes a figure-eight trajectory by wiggling its abdomen (hence the name of the dance); the intensity of the abdominal wiggles indicates a greater distance (about 1 km or more) from the hive to where the nectar was found.
In the wiggling dance, the number of semicircles the bee makes around the comb in a given time decreases as the source of the nectar moves away from the hive. For example, at a distance of 100 metres the bee makes 11 circles in 15 seconds, at twice that distance (200 metres) only 8, and so on. In other words, the closer the source of the nectar, the more excited the bee is and the faster it circles.
At the same time, the number of abdominal wiggles increases sharply with distance (two or three wiggles at 100 metres, six to eight at 400 metres, ten to eleven at 700 metres, etc.). The combination of walking speed and abdominal wiggles allows the scout to tell the bees with sufficient accuracy how far they have to fly.
Conclusion
Until recently, many scientists did not believe that bees use such a complex and diverse language. It was only in the early 1990s that doubts were dispelled by a robotic bee developed by the Danes. This miniature mechanical creature repeated exactly all the figures of the dance described by Frisch, and the bees flew exactly where the robot told them to go.
