The strain of honeybee used in our experiments is not aggressive.
One of the most dramatic developments in the study of animal behavior was
Karl von Frisch's discovery in the 1940's that honeybees have a form of
symbolic communication, the dance language. This discovery came
near the end of von Frisch's long scientific career, after he had been
studying honeybees for some 20 years.
Although the first scientific reactions ranged from polite doubt to
vigorous attempts at disproof, the dance language has by now been
repeatedly confirmed by many clever experiments in a variety of
laboratories. It continues to inspire fascinating new explorations
of animal communication.
Bees returning to the hive with nectar (and sometimes other substances
needed by the hive, like pollen, water, or the location of a new nest
site), perform either round dances, if they have arrived from a
location nearby, or waggle dances if they have arrived from farther
away (more than 50-200 meters, depending on the genetic strain of bees).
The waggle dance traces out a figure-8 pattern in which it encodes both
the distance and the direction from the hive to the source of the nectar.
The distance is indicated by the average duration of a complete
circuit (or the number of circuits in a given amount of time), and the
direction from the hive toward the food with respect to the direction
of the sun is indicated by the orientation of the waggle on the
vertical honeycomb with respect to gravity.
It is now definitely established that bees in the hive obtain information
from their sisters' waggle dances about the location of food and then use
this information when they leave the hive to forage. In short, the
dances tell other bees where to find food.
Foraging honeybees use other cues to find food as well, as von Frisch
documented extensively, including the scent and the color
surrounding the food (in natural conditions, of course, without
ethologists' experiments with sucrose solutions, nectar is obtained from
flowers).
In this exercise, you will have a chance to observe bees dancing in their
hive, to practice translating the dance language, and to see if you can
find flowers the way bees do.
Your textbook includes more information about these dances and the
information they include.
Under ideal conditions, experimenters mark bees with tiny spots of paint
at artificial feeding stations supplied with concentrated sucrose
solutions and then watch these bees dancing in the hive. We cannot
achieve this ideal on the Carolina campus, both because too many bees come
to feeding stations from other hives (including feral colonies) within a
few miles and because the bees from our hive have too many different
sources of nectar available on campus.
Careful experiments like those conducted by von Frisch and others have
required hives isolated in large fields without flowers (football stadiums
in the midst of parking lots work well!). Nevertheless, we can see
waggle dances and can often discover from them where our bees are finding
food.
Using your understanding of the waggle dance, you should be able to
estimate within about 100 m the location of a food source.
- Work in teams of two or three.
- Make careful measurements of the duration and orientation of the
waggle dances by one bee, ideally at least ten dances.
- Average your measurements to increase your precision.
- Plot your results on a map.
- After checking with your Teaching Assistant, go as a team to try to
locate the food source.
- Report back with evidence that you have in fact located the food your
dancing bee was advertising in the hive.
Take time to observe the normal activities in the hive. Notice the
foragers and the hive attendants, the storage of nectar and pollen, and
the feeding of larvae. Try to locate the queen and her retinue.
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Frisch, K. von. 1974. Decoding the language of the bees.
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Frisch, K. von. 1967. The dance language and orientation of
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