Page 95 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

Harun Yahya 93

by dancing, we need to consider their movements in the hive and their
overall environment. In her book Through Our Eyes Only?: The Search for
Animal Consciousness, the evolutionist author Marian Stamp Dawkins dis-
cusses how the bees give these directions:
The problem the bees have is that they often dance on the inside of a dark hive
where neither the food itself nor the sun is visible. Not only that, but they are
dancing on a vertical comb when information has to be given to the other bees
about which direction they should fly in the horizontal plane. 78
Although the bees giving the directions dance on a vertical surface, the
bees going out to seek the food source will operate in a horizontal plane.
In other words, the information about which direction they must take
should actually be expressed in a horizontal plane. If the bees were to act
according to directions given in a vertical plane, then they would fly
straight upwards, and it would be totally impossible for them to find any
food.
In her book, Dawkins continues:
The bees cannot, therefore, indicate the direction of food by simply pointing or
dancing towards it. They translate the flight path from hive to food (which will

Food source

One species of honeybee,
known as the dwarf honeybee,
always constructs its hives in
the open. When they find a
food source, they generally
dance on top of the nest cov-
ered with bees (left). These
bees perform the figure-eight
dance to point to the food
source directly. If for any rea-
son they dance on the sides or
rear of the hive, they redirect
their dances again to indicate
the direction of the source.