Why do bees dance?
When the scout bees discover a rich source of food they return to the hive and after that the collectors fly directly to the place to collect the nectar and pollen without the need of a guide. This happens almost miraculously to the beginning observer, who has not previously seen that these bees have attended the informational dance of the explorers.
Aristotle devoted much of his time to observing the way bees work but failed to discover the exact form of making honey. The scholar thought that it came from the sky, as a rain or dew deposited on the leaves and flowers of the plants, which was then removed or collected by the bees for their final production.
The lack of science at the time and the little accumulated evidence made him speculate about the production of honey, but the great Greek thinker was one of the first to be struck by the collective behavior of bees and, among other behaviors, remained fascinated with the dance or ritual of the explorers.
Aristotle was the first to discover that bees communicate with each other to organize and work.
Karl von Frisch (1886 - 1982), demonstrated in 1944 the communicational language of bees as a result of the results of his tests and trials that confirmed his thesis that bees, upon returning to the hive, communicate all the information to their companions on the fields and flowers richest in nectar to collect what they have found. This communication ritual is a unique dance or dance full of information towards their companions that the scout bees perform.
Karl von Frisch is considered the father of ethology, which is the science that studies the behavior of animals, and for his discoveries related to living beings he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine - Physiology in 1973. His main interest was whether beings alive they could distinguish the colors or brightness, and in his speech "Decoding the language of the bees", which he pronounced before the Swedish Academy at the time of receiving the Nobel, his words stand out:
"It was thought that bees and other insects were totally blind to colors. But the bright colors of the flowers can be understood only as an adaptation to the color sensitivity of its visitors "
The discovery of the Austrian scientist reveals that when the explorer bees discover a rich source of food they return to the hive and after that the collectors fly directly to the place to collect the nectar and pollen without the need for guidance. This happens almost miraculously to the beginning observer, who has not previously seen that these bees have attended the informational dance of the explorers.
This dance, as a ritual, is what transmits all the information and geolocation of the food sources. It is a choreography full of meanings and some of its discovered codes in relation to the distances indicate that if the explorers dance in a circle, the field is less than fifty meters away, in cambo, if the flowers are more than 150 meters from the hive, the explorers dance making a figure in the shape of eight, drawing a line that first goes in a straight direction, then makes a semicircle, again moving in a straight line and ending with another semicircle. In the phase of rectilinear displacement, the bee strongly moves the abdomen on both sides. The farther the food is, the more vigorous is this movement of the abdomen.
The scientist, in his observations collected in the book "The life of the bees", realized that for the bees to know the distance is not enough, they also transmit the direction in which the source of nectar and pollen is, so that the insect performs a dance perpendicular to the roof of the honeycomb, if the food is in the same direction as the sun. If the flowers are, for example, at 20 or 30 degrees to the left of the sun, the dance will be executed at 20 or 30 degrees to the left of the vertical of the honeycomb respectively. The dancing explorer bees translate the degree of the solar angle to the gravitational angle, so the place where the bee is located with respect to the vertical of the honeycomb represents exactly the angle that exists between the food source and the position of the sun, using the hive as a vertex. This choreography of the explorers is changing according to the movement of the Earth with respect to the sun, on a daily basis and throughout the seasons.
The ideas and experiments of Karl von Frisch inspired other scientists and researchers from around the world to study communications in animals, because for many centuries communication had been the exclusive domain of human beings, although Aristotle argued otherwise.
Source: Blueberrieschile.cl - Blueberriesconsulting.com
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