We fell down a bee rabbit hole this week and came back genuinely impressed. A honeybee finds a patch of good flowers, flies back to the hive, and then dances to tell the other bees where to go. Not metaphorically. Actually dances, in the pitch dark, on a vertical honeycomb. And the other bees read it like a map.
The scout bee runs in a straight line while waggling her abdomen, then loops back and does it again, tracing a figure-eight. The straight part is the important bit. The angle of that waggle run, measured against straight up on the honeycomb, tells the other bees the direction of the food relative to the sun. Straight up means fly toward the sun. Forty degrees left of vertical means fly forty degrees left of the sun. The length of the waggle run tells them how far. Roughly one second of waggling equals about a kilometer of flight. There's even a little enthusiasm dial — better food, more vigorous dance.
Karl von Frisch spent decades in the 1920s through 1960s watching bees through glass-walled hives, painting tiny numbers on their backs, and slowly working out that the dance wasn't random. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for it, shared with two other animal behavior researchers. For a long time plenty of scientists thought he was wrong — surely bees were just following scent trails, right? Turns out no. Researchers later did the beautiful and slightly diabolical experiment of building a tiny robot bee that could dance on command, and the real bees flew to wherever the robot told them to go. That pretty much sealed it.
Bees are doing all of this in total darkness. The other bees aren't watching the dance visually. They're feeling it — vibrations through the comb, air currents from the waggling wings, and touch. They're also compensating for the fact that the sun moves across the sky while the scout is inside dancing. If a bee dances for twenty minutes, she adjusts the angle of her waggle run to account for how much the sun has shifted. A brain the size of a grass seed is doing live celestial navigation math. We have phones that can't hold a Bluetooth connection to a speaker six feet away, and a bee is out here running dead reckoning.
If you've got a favorite piece of animal-behavior weirdness we should write up for a future Friday, send it our way. We're always taking suggestions.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
