A bee's GPS

[jakanapes]

So is there some entomolgist out there who knows some of the specifics about how honeybees tell each other where to find new pollen sources? Has anyone decoded their little dance?

[jamshid]

IIRC, Discover magazine did an short piece about a mathematician who apparently believed bees were communicating these things using a 6-dimensional structured dance. No idea exactly when the piece was run, but I think it was about two years ago.

Whether the work is discredited now or not is also up for grabs. Made for some interesting reading, tho’.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Put in “honeybee dance”. I got 1,178 hits. Betcha can’t top that.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

This was on Discovery or TLC, back before they started doing pseudo-science.

I’ll try to relay what they said:

The angle at which the bee does her dance corresponds to the angle of the sun.

I know that doesn’t make much sense, because I don’t remember what the reference points were, but their point was that the bee does her dance with her body positioned a certain way. It then said that that angle used with the sun as a reference tells the bee in which direction to fly.

I just don’t remember it well enough to explain it clearly.

But they did show a bee that had just found some good flowers doing a “shake.”

The bee then circled and did another shake (and possibly even more times). But every “shake” was done with the bee’s body in the same position. (For example, if the bee shook her body with the head in the 270 degree position, every subsequent shake was done at 270 degrees.)

[Morgan]

Using some key search words (bee dance angle sun) I found a “Zoology 531 Bee Dance Laboratory Fall 1999” assignment from the University of Wisconsin

When a forager returns to the hive after visiting a rich food source, she moves to a crowded section of the comb and initiates dancing. The form of the dance depends upon the distance from the food source to the hive. The ROUND DANCE is performed when the food source is less than about 25 meters from the hive (Fig. 1). If the food source is between 25 m and 100 m from the hive, a SICKLE DANCE is performed (Fig. 2). If the distance to the food source is greater than 100 m, a WAGGLE DANCE is performed (Fig. 3).

The waggle dance and the sickle dance both contain vector information about the location of the food source. During the waggle portion of these dances, the forager runs in a straight line. In the waggle dance, the angle between the waggle run and the vertical axis of the comb is equal to the angle between the sun azimuth and the food source, as measured from the hive. (To find the sun azimuth, look at the edge of the shadow of a vertical object.) This is the course a bee must fly to find the food (Fig. 4). The sickle dance contains two waggle runs, performed at different angles. The true sun compass angle in this case is the imaginary angle which bisects the two angles (Fig. 2).

[Smeghead]

I also thought I heard that the number of shakes corresponds to the distance from the hive. I think we should adopt that system immediately. You want men to start asking for directions? Start giving directions by having women waggle around!