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.