Page 87 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

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cientists have performed a great deal of research to determine
how the order is maintained in the hive, in which tens of thou-
Ssands of bees live. A large number of academic studies have been
carried out to that end as well. One prominent expert and professor at the
University of Munich, the Australian zoologist Karl von Frisch, has devot-
ed an entire 350-page book to bee communication, The Dance Language and
Orientation of Bees.

How Do Bees Communicate?

To find food, bees must usually search wide areas and fly
long distances. When a bee finds a new source of food, it imme-
diately returns to the hive to inform the other members of the colony.
Shortly afterwards, other bees begin flying around the source.
Bees are deaf, and cannot therefore establish communications by
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means of sound. Nevertheless, they are able to communicate the location
of a food source to the other members of the colony with no difficulty. The
methods they employ are quite extraordinary.
Scientists studying how bees inform each other of the places they find
made a most astonishing discovery. Bees “describe” the location of a dis-
tant place by dancing. All the information that other bees need to find the
food source—its distance from the hive, its direction, productivity—is en-
coded in this dance.
Once it locates a new food source, the bee returns to the hive and starts
repeating specific movements in such a way as to attract the other bees’ at-
tention. All the information they need about the food source can be ob-
tained from the bee’s general behavior. For instance, if a bee simply
returns to the hive, deposits its load of collected pollen and flies off again,
this means that the source that the bee used is either already known or else
not very productive. At times when water is scarce, they’ll also use this
dance to describe the location of water. 73

Adnan Oktar