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East Riding Honey and Bee Supplies
Why Do Honeybees Dance?
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Pointing the Way
Honeybees are social insects, they live in colonies of up to 50,000 individuals.One of the
advantages of being part of a colony rather than an individual is that you can share details about a
food source so that all can benefit.This is how bees do it;
"Scout" bees travel the countryside looking for flowers. When they find a good patch of flowers they
investigate, gather nectar and return to the hive
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Once inside they walk to a suitable comb and begin
to dance.The dance is called a Waggle Dance and is designed to tell other bees the direction
and distance to the flowers and, by the amount the bee "waggles", how good a source of nectar it
is.When it waggles the bee vibrates its body and walks forward.It is the angle from vertical that
the bee walks as it waggles that tells the other bees the direction of the flowers when compared
to the direction of the sun.
So if a bee does the waggle part of the dance at 20 degrees off vertical then the flowers are 20 degrees
from the location of the sun.
Because bees can detect ultraviolet light (which penetrates clouds) they can even detect where the sun
is when it is cloudy. |
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Scout bees will also share the nectar they have gathered with the "audience"
so that the bees they are trying to recruit to go the same flowers will taste the nectar they can expect to find.
The picure on the left shows bees sharing nectar in this way.
You have to remember that this whole dance takes place in the darkness of the inside of the hive.
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The "audience" of bees follow the dance through the vibrations on their feet of the dance and sensing air movement
with their antennae. Once they have been recruited by the scout bee and return they too dance for other bees until
thousands of workers can be all visiting the same patch of flowers.
Its only worker bees who dance. The only Dancing Queens I know are in the song by Abba. |
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Agent for Thorne Beekeeping Equipment |
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