Science Puzzle
How Does a Bee Tell the Hive Where the Flowers Are?
A honeybee finds a rich patch of flowers 1.5 kilometres from her hive. Back home, in the dark on the upright honeycomb, she performs a strange dance: a straight run while waggling her body from side to side, then a loop back round to the start, again and again, alternating left and right loops. Other bees crowd round her, then fly straight to the flowers.
What is the dance telling them, and how?
The Answer
The dance is a map. The direction of the waggling run gives the direction of the flowers compared with the Sun, and how long the waggling lasts gives the distance.
On the upright comb, "straight up" stands for the direction of the Sun, even though the dancer can't see the Sun at all. If the flowers lie straight towards the Sun, the bee waggles straight up the comb. If they lie 40 degrees to the right of the Sun, she waggles 40 degrees to the right of straight up. The Sun moves across the sky during the day, and dancing bees shift the angle of their runs to keep up.
Distance is in the timing: the further away the flowers, the longer the waggling run lasts, roughly a second for every kilometre. A run of about 1.5 seconds means flowers about 1.5 kilometres away. The other bees can't see in the dark hive, so they follow the dancer closely and pick up the message through touch and vibrations.
The Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch worked this out and shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his discoveries. Researchers today still decode dances to map where bees go to feed.
The principle: Communication with a code. Honeybees turn a direction into an angle from straight up, which stands for the Sun, and a distance into the length of a waggling run, so a dance becomes a map.