Dancing bees
by Robert Doolan
The top row shows the dance pattern which the bee performs to tell others in the
hive the distance and direction to find the new food source.
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Imagine you are a honeybee. You leave your hive one fine spring morning and scout
around until you notice a field full of new flowers in bloom. The food back in your
hive, which the 15,000 bees in your colony have fed on through the winter, has been
getting low. But now, in this field, you have found a new food supply. So you fill
your special honey stomach with nectar and fly the 250 metres back to your hive.
The other bees do not yet know where to find the blooms you have discovered. Your
brain is only the size of a pinhead, but it is obvious that if you are to fully
utilize this new food source you will need help. Before summer arrives, your colony
could number more than 80,000 bees. But the little bit of pollen and nectar you
would collect in each trip could see your colony starve before each member was fed.
So how do you tell the other bees in your hive where to find the blossoms you have
discovered?
In the early 1900s, Austrian naturalist Karl von Frisch puzzled over this curious
problem. Fascinated with the ways honeybees worked together, von Frisch began a
deep study of them. He found that one of the most remarkable characteristics of
bees is the way they communicate. In fact, bees have one of the most extraordinary
means of communication in the insect world. Von Frisch discovered that bees express
themselves not only by feeling and tasting, but also by dancing.
To identify the location of a food source too distant from the hive to be smelled
or seen by the other bees, the scout does a dance on the honeycomb inside the hive.
Other bees gather around and closely follow the dancer. They imitate her movements
(all dancing worker bees are female), and note the fragrance on her of the flowers
from which the dancer gathered the nectar.
If the new food source is nearby, say within about 50 metres of the hive, the bee
does a circular dance on the surface of the honeycomb. She moves around two or three
centimetres (an inch or so), then circles in the opposite direction. This tells
the other bees the food is close by. The scent they detect on her alerts them to
what the new food smells like. So the other bees leave the hive and fly around in
ever-widening circles until they find the new supply of flowers.
Dance for distance
If the new source of nectar or pollen is distant, the scout makes an ingenious alteration
to her dance. She dances the shape of a ‘figure eight’, with intermittent
movements across the middle of the figure. The distance at which the changeover
takes place, from round dance to figure eight, varies among different types of bees.
This does not cause them confusion, for the distance is constant within each hive.
Every movement by the scout has meaning for the other bees. They can tell the
distance of the food source by the number of times the dancer circles
during a given interval, and also by her wiggling abdomen. The greater the distance,
the more slowly she wiggles. The direction of the food is revealed
by the direction and angle the dancing bee cuts across the circle. If she wiggles
across the circle straight up, the watching bees know they will find the food by
flying towards the sun. If she cuts the circle straight down, they know
they have to fly away from the sun.
If the dancing bee cuts across the circle at an angle, the other bees know they
must fly to the right or left of the sun at the same angle the dancer moved
to the right or left of an imagined vertical line.
This dazzling display of the honeybee dancers is truly a striking feature of the
insect world. When we consider the complicated steps of the dance, and the detailed
information conveyed and understood through it by all the world’s honeybees
(von Frisch took 20 years to decipher it), we are entitled to strongly doubt that
this process could ever evolve.
Could the dance evolve?
Let’s try to imagine the system evolving. A bee discovers a field in bloom.
She returns to her hive and no one else knows where she filled her honey stomach.
She can’t tell them herself, so the hive has to wait until individual bees
haphazardly chance upon the same field, or she has to keep going back and forward
hoping someone will follow her. Even worse, she may not remember how to get back
to the field herself!
Now let’s suppose that one day an enterprising bee manages to invent the dance.
How would she communicate to the others what it meant? How could she ever explain
the geometry involved — that the angle she walks across the diameter of the
circle is equal to the angle between the sun and the food source? What if the sun
goes down before the other bees understand? How does she explain she has invented
one dance for a food supply nearby, and another for a supply a long distance away?
How does she tell them that if she wiggles very slowly it means the field is very
distant, and if she wiggles very fast it means the field is not far? How will they
know that if the dancer walks up the honeycomb they should fly
towards the sun, but if she walks down they must fly in the opposite
direction?
Even more important, if this process slowly evolved over a long time, how would
all the bee ancestors have survived while this system of communication was evolving?
If they survived without this complicated method, why invent a new system
that would be almost impossible to explain?
Among the wonders of God’s creation, the honeybee provides some startling
evidence against evolution, and for design and purpose by the Creator. The precisely
co-ordinated language used for the bee’s survival has too many necessary and
independent parts for such a system to have evolved. We are forced by logic and
common sense to conclude that the whole process was implanted in bees at the time
of their creation. Like the bees, it did not and could not evolve.
The ‘round dance’ reveals a food source not far away. The ‘figure
eight’ dance reveals a distant food source.
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The dance of the figure eight is also used when bees are selecting a new home site.
If a hive grows too large, the queen may leave with part of the colony to search
for a new home. She leaves behind one or more special eggs from which a new queen
will hatch. The old queen and her swarm first congregate somewhere, such as on a
branch of a tree. Worker bees are then sent to scout around for a suitable new home
site. Any scout who finds a potential site returns to the others and tells them
where her favoured site is by doing the ‘figure eight’ dance on the
surface of the cluster of bees.
Other bees inspect each site and return to the colony to tell the others what they
‘think’ of it. The vigour of their dancing reflects their reactions
to the suitability of the site. Finally, after perhaps several days of house-hunting,
one of the sites gains overwhelming favour and the swarm moves off to start a new
hive there.
One researcher watched this dance contest for four days, noting directions and distances
of potential sites. He worked out the site, which was rapidly gaining favour, then
hurried off to find it. He arrived at the new dwelling-place before even the bees
did!
Such complicated communication seems impossible to explain if you believe bees and
their language have evolved.
(Available in Chinese (Traditional))
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