The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee

Aristotle was one of the first to document the intriguing behavior of honeybees how is it for instance that the colony coordinates its workers activity what appears to be a random swarming mass of life may actually be intelligent behavior a foraging honeybee will eventually discover a new food source such as a freshly blooming flower or artificial feeder placed by scientist after this visit an interesting thing happens over the next few minutes many other bees arrive at the same location they don't travel as a group instead each bee finds the food source individually how could these bees who held no previous knowledge of this site suddenly know precisely where the feeder was located is it possible that the animals communicate amongst themselves to answer this question Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch devised a series of experiments in the 1940s researchers at Georgia Tech have reproduced from fish's pioneering experiments using a modern observation hive two feeders are placed in different directions away from the hive at each location visiting honey bees are marked with a small spot of paint a separate color of paint is used at each station so when a bee returns to the hive it can easily be determined which feeding site it visited before font fresh other scientists had observed that returning bees tended to waggle about excitedly in a figure-eight pattern before sharing the collected pollen and nectar with their hive mates in this two-station experiment from fresh notice that the bees returning from the same feeding source danced differently from bees that arrived from the other location while both sets of bees perform the classic figure 8 dance the orientation of the dances is offset between the two groups bees returning from one feeder perform a rotated version of the dance done by the other bees incredibly the angle of rotation precisely matches the angle between the feeding stations and the hive this must be a clue to the mystery of how the bees are able to share information about the location of food through further experimentation details of the grammar of the honeybees dance language began to emerge the dance exploits two fundamental tools available to the honeybee first their ability to see ultraviolet and polarized light allows them to determine the location of the Sun at all times ultraviolet light is able to penetrate thick clouds or fog also as light from the Sun passes through the atmosphere its polarized in a direction towards the Sun when viewed from the earth devices like polarized film sunglasses or honeybee eyes can detect this orientation and determine the position of the Sun even while looking in the opposite direction this gives the bees a type of solar compass allowing them to always know the precise position of the Sun in the sky a honey bees entire environment seems to be constantly pointing towards the Sun in addition to this solar compass bees possess a finely tuned internal clock this clock is accurate enough for the bees to constantly estimate the new position of the Sun as it travels across the sky in this way a honeybee can know the current orientation of the Sun even after spending many hours within the dark hive they can even take into account changes in seasons or latitudes inside of a dark vertically oriented bee hive the natural shared reference point is gravity establishing both an up and a down direction Obie's solar compass and internal clock provides another communal reference point the Sun by pairing these two global constants the bees form a simple language within the hive the direction up away from gravity substitutes for the location of the Sun then the angle that the bee dances compared to this up Direction is the same angle a bee should fly away from the Sun in order to find the target flower so if the bee dances directly upward other bees know that they can find flowers by flying directly towards the Sun if a bee dances 90 degrees to the left then bees leaving the hive should fly 90 degrees to the left of the Sun or be angling it's dance towards the ground will let others know to fly directly away from the Sun as the day goes by the bee will even use its internal clock to adjust for the movement of the Sun in the sky this lets fellow workers always know the correct direction to travel in order to find food the central waggle section of the bees dance also contains information about the distance to a food source longer time spent in this part of the dance means that the food is further away shorter durations mean that the food is closer by in general a bee increases the duration of this section by one second for every kilometer of distance to the food when food is within several meters of the hive the central section of the dance will shrink causing a circular dance for bees distance is actually measured by the amount of energy it takes them to travel thus a strong headwind could cause a bee to dance as if the food came from a further distance away again the information contained in a honeybees dance consists of two parts one the orientation of the dance which describes what angle to travel away from the Sun and two the duration of the middle part of the dance which expresses the distance of a food source away from the hive other information such as quality or abundance of food might also be encoded within other parameters of the dance or in pheromones released by the be a georgia tech's multi-agent robotics and systems laboratory our goal is to work with scientists to automate the tracking and help understand the organization of multiple automata by harnessing new computer vision techniques we can more efficiently and effectively study the behavior of large colonies of living organisms this information can help us uncover more secrets behind animal communication and lead to innovations in robotics you

Channel: Georgia Tech College of Computing

Views: 657,938

Rating: 4.9358974 out of 5

Keywords: waggle dance, honeybees, honeybee, bee, bees, communicate, hive, beehive, computer vision, robotics, karl von frisch, frisch, von frisch, dance, circle dance, paint, painting, bee painting, angle, sun, flower, visualization, rotoscope, rotobrush

Id: bFDGPgXtK-U

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Cool stuff. It's about the only thing I remember from 8th grade bio class.

[u/zingbat]

In other words, bees are better at geometry than most humans.

[u/destroyerofwhirls]

bees kick ass!

[u/JackRawlinson]

In England we named a beer after it.

[u/[deleted]]

another weird thing was as a kid, we set an ant hill on fire. the next day the survivors made three neat, equal piles of their dead bretheren on the ruins of the hill. I still dont know why they did that.

[u/Armitage1]

Too bad they are dying off and no one gives a shit because protecting agriculture is more important.

[u/OneSalientOversight]

Hello fellow bees. How's the abdomen? Swollen with nectar I trust?

[u/twackle]

Polar coordinates, how do they work?

[u/Scuderia]

The Waggle Dance