The Waggle Dance

I am regularly teased by other stallholders at the markets I do about how I 'go on a bit' about bees.
As you both should know I don't eat honey and have no interest in selling honey, yet if anyone asks me about bees, its dark before they get home.

Our bee keeping started off in a fairly normal way and any honey the bees produced we gave away.
Sue originally was the bee keeper and I was 'Mister Shifter' the general helper.
Things changed when I stopped working and had more time for the bees and looking back I think there were two events that cemented my interest in the bees rather than the honey thing.
My Grandsons know I keep bees and my daughter had a lavender bush in her garden. It was for the bees and Luke used to practice his counting by counting the bees on the lavender.
One day Luke came flying into the house in a real panic and it took Nikkie some time to calm him down and ask him what had happened. 'There's a bee in the garden and my teacher told me bees hurt me'.
When I found this out it was all I could do to stop myself going to his school to speak to his teacher and point out her brainless, ill informed Daily Mail view of things was wrong.
After this I think I became rather evangelical about explaining what bees were about.

The second thing that locked me in was when I found out about the Waggle Dance.
When I give talks about honey bees to groups like the Women's Institute,, the bit I enjoy most is when I talk about the how bees communicate with each other using the Waggle Dance. Normally the reaction to it is one of open mouthed amazement bordering on disbelief.

For as long as we have interacted with bees, we have seen them do the Dance.
The dance is pretty much the same every time. The bee will walk in a straight line shaking vigorously. It then walks back in a loop to the starting point and walks in a straight line again shaking,then loops back again making a figure of eight pattern.

Although the basic structure of the walk - waggle-walk-waggle-walk, stays the same the direction of the waggle varies with different bees, even in the same hive at the same time.

For thousands of years we have tried to domesticate bees and seen the Dance, yet nobody could work out why they did it.
The Greeks, who had an opinion on everything, thought they did it because they were happy which doesn't seem unreasonable.
Here's a bee dancing

However, an Austrian scientist called Karl von Frisch came up with a theory.

His findings were initially met with a mixture of scepticism and derision but eventually his discovery was confirmed and combined with his work that found bees can see in colour, it earned him a Nobel Prize.

What he discovered was that the bee doing the Waggle Dance was telling the other bees in the hive where they could find food.

Blimey.

Von Frisch's experiment involved having a colony of bees with two alternative food sources [bowls of syrup] in different directions from the hive.

As the bees visited the food source a blob of paint was put on their back, green for one source, red for the other.

When the bees returned to the hive and did the Dance, the bees watching the 'Green Dancer' were given a blog of green paint and the bees watching the 'Red Dancer' a red one. The direction of the Waggles from the vertical.were recorded.

When the newly marked green bees left the colony they went to the Green source of food and the red bees to the Red source

Von Frisch measured the angle of the bees waggle part of the dances and found that the angle of the direction from the vertical on the frame corresponded to the angle from the sun to the sources of the food.

The bees have their own GPS system to help them find food. and can translate a vertical plane of movement to a horizontal one.

At this point the WI are merely stunned.

Next I ask if there's a problem with a navigation system based on the sun. 'It can be cloudy' is the obvious reply to which I point out bees can see UV light and polarised light so they can see where the Sun is even if it cloudy and overcast.

There is an increase in stunnedness.

Von Frisch's experiments have been reproduced many times and with the ability to tag individual bees and develop computer simulations, the next discovery was that the length of the Waggle told the other bees how far away the food was and it's thought that 1 second of Waggle is equivalent to about 0.8 kilometre.

So not only can the bees tell other bees where the food is, but how far away it is.

At this point the the needle on the Stunnedness Meter heads rapidly towards the red.

Its also been shown that the strength and repetition of the Waggle indicates the value of the food source. Repeated vigorous Waggles indicate a good food source, a short disinterested Waggle suggests it's not worth the journey

So not only can the bees tell other bees where the food is, how far away it is but what they will find when they get there.

Bees can stay in the hive for some time and the finale of the talk is that the bees have metallic cells in their head that they use for navigation. These cells also tell the bees how much the Earth has rotated over time and therefore the Sun moved so they can adjust their Waggle so the other bees don't turn up at the wrong place.

At this point there is often the sound of jaws hitting table tops.

The Waggle Dance is often referred to as the most sophisticated form of communication by a non primate. I've met several primates who aren't this sophisticated.

This generates a lot of interest at the talks I give and I have spoken to a few people who feel that something this complex done by a humble insect must be proof of a God. How could Evolution produce something so sophisticated?

Its actually more complex than they think.
A protege of Von Frisch, Martin Landauer, discovered bees use the same directional communication system to indicate to a swarm of bees where a new home could be.
When a swarm is looking for a new home, scout bees survey the area and inform other bees in the swarm of where potential  new homes are by using the Waggle Dance.
There can be many different candidates for a new home but as time goes on it appears the bees reach a consensus as the number of different Dances reduce and once 'agreement' on a particular site is reached, the bees go there.
It seems that the various sites can change in popularity over time and the number of 'Waggle votes' can increases and decrease as the bee explore the possibilities.

However bizarre this may sound there it is thought that bees have developed some form of decision making process. Experiments have shown what sort of things are looking for in  a new home and its possible to rate them and this is reflected in the number of bees indicating a particular possible new home.
They have a limited time to make their minds up as their internal food supplies run out after ten days so decisions aren't always perfect.Bees, like us might have to make a 'good enough' choice

I'm reading a book about this at the moment and might try to do a blog on it.
It is amazing and the problem is I can only read bits at a time before I come all over all John McEnroe