Page 88 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

86 THE MIRACLE OF THE HONEYBEE

The Bee Dance

The bee dance takes two distinct forms, depending on the distance of
the food source.
The form known as the “round dance,” encountered most frequently,
doesn’t bother to indicate the food source’s distance and direction. It does,
however, tell the workers that the source is closer than 15 meters (50 feet)
from the nest. Having located a food source, the bee first gives nectar to
the workers in the nest, and then begins her dance, repeatedly making
small circles. The other bees then gather around the dancer. She reverses
direction and turns around the other way every one or two revolutions, or
even more often. This dance, which can last for a few seconds or up to
minutes, consists of up to 20 reversals and is followed by another ex-
change of nectar between the dancer and the bees in the nest.
Eventually the dance comes to an end. The dancing bee flies off to look
for another source of food. In one experiment, Karl von Frisch showed
that of the 174 bees who made contact with the dancing bee, 155 found the
food source within five minutes. 74
The bees perform their dances on the vertical comb, in the
darkness of the hive—most important in helping us bet-
ter understand bees’ flawless abilities to communicate.
In the pitch dark, bees give the other workers around
them all the information they could possibly need
about the food source. Although their move-
ments on the combs are performed in
darkness, they are still correctly per-
ceived by their fellows and immediately
followed up.
In the same way that bees perform a
round dance for food sources within 15

Karl von Frisch has spent his entire life studying
bees and won a Nobel Prize for his research on
that subject.