Communication 2

This blog entry about communication is one that interests me the most. Honey bees communicate in many different ways, smells, touching and dancing. The information found here was from NC State University. 

The late Karl von Frisch, a professor of zoology at the University of Munich in Germany, is credited with interpreting the meaning of honey bee dance movements. He and his students carried out decades of research in which they carefully described the different components of each dance. Their experiments typically used glass-walled observation hives and paint-marked bee foragers. First, they trained the foragers to find food at sources placed at known distances from the colony. When the bees returned from gathering food from those sources, von Frisch and his students carefully measured both the duration and angle of the dances the foragers performed to recruit other bees to help gather food. Their findings led them to the concept of a dance language. Von Frisch’s work eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973. 

The waggle dance or wag-tail dance is performed by bees foraging at food sources that are more than 500 feet from the hive. This dance, unlike the round dance, communicates both distance and direction. This dance, unlike the round dance, communicates both distance and direction. While several variables of the waggle dance relate to distance the duration of the straight-run portion of the dance, measured in seconds, is the simplest and most reliable indicator of distance. As the distance to the food source increases, the duration of the waggling portion of the dance also increases. (Dr. David R. Tarpy)

Bibliography

Dr. David R. Tarpy, Assistant Professor and Extension Apiculturist. http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf. April 2004.

 

Communication 1

There are electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, or rub body parts together that may allow the honey bees to talk to each other. Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet.

It has been known for some time that bees perform an intricate dance in directing their hive mates to a source of food. Now most bee keepers can show you the most looked at and studied form of communication called the “waggle dance.” When there is a dense patch of flowers or a source of water, they walk across the comb in the hive to show a pattern consistent to the direction of and also the distance to the flowers.

It appears that they also transmit information by means of sound. The first and most obvious guess was that the bee might create the pulses of sound with the waggling of its abdomen.  The other possibilities are that the bees produce sound by vibrating their wings. The function of sound was illuminated by considering the question of whether or not the bee’s judgment of distances is affected by the wind. When a bee flies to a source of food against the wind, the sounds indicating the distance tend to be a little longer than when it does not fly against the wind. .  (Perkins)

Bibliography

Perkins, Sid. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/bees-buzz-electric-field-communication_n_2966015.html. March 2013.

Honey Bee Health Part 2

I just read this report and wanted to pass it on to you. RIVERSIDE, Calif, traditionally, honey bee research has focused on environmental stressors such as pesticides, pathogens and diseases.  Now a research team led by entomologists at the University of California, Riverside has published a study that focuses on an anthropogenic pollutant: selenium (Se). “Metal pollutants like selenium contaminate soil, water, can be accumulated in plants, and can even be atmospherically deposited on the hive itself,” said Kristen Hladun, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral entomologist.

According to Hladun, knowing which contaminants are the most important to regulate is key to minimizing the exposure of honey bee hives to contaminants.

“Beekeepers can take steps to prevent bees from foraging during flowering periods of plants that have exceptional pollutant levels or to move hives away from contaminated areas,” she said.  “Also, better management of weedy plant species that are known to be Se-accumulators can prevent them from becoming a route of exposure.”

After I read this report it made me think of ways to try and protect my honey bees from metal contaminants. Learning that these contaminants are in plants, the water they drink and in the soil there is not much hope for me protecting them, so instead all I can do is try not to pollute the earth any more than it already is.  (Hladun)

Bibliography

Hladun. "Health of honey bees adversely impacted by selenium." Press-News.org (2013).