Does dancing come to mind when you think of bees? They are actually very talented in what is known in their circles as the "waggle dance."
"And when you get the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance." - from the song I Hope You Dance
No doubt about it, bees are fascinating! There is so much that is amazing and interesting that you can learn about them!
Honeybees are the kind of bee that are featured in most of my bee photography. In reading about them, I kept seeing mention of the "waggle dance." Anything that mentions dancing insects catches my interest!
The waggle dance is an intriguing sort of dance that is actually a form of communication that is for the benefit of the worker bees in the colony. Its sole purpose is to let the others know the location of a nearby top-notch nectar source. Dancing for the good of the community
is my kind fun!
When a honeybee finds a rich source of nectar, she will come back to the hive and dance. One of the dances is this waggle dance. She moves in a figure-eight pattern with a "waggle run" between the loops in which she waggles in a semi-straight line. The length of the line shows how far it is to the flower patch with the wonderful nectar.
Now this is where it gets more impressive and amazing. The direction of the source of the nectar is shown by the waggle dance, using the sun as reference. According to a PBS website about beehive communication, "she indicates the direction of the source by the angle her waggle walk deviates from an imaginary straight line drawn from the dance floor to the sun at its current position. In other words, if the source lies in the exact direction of the sun, the bee will walk facing exactly straight up (remember that a hive hangs vertically). If it lies 20 degrees to the right of that imaginary line to the sun, the angle of the bee's walk will be 20 degrees to the right of vertical." Nature and its workings are awe-inspiring! The worker bees watch the dancer's movement and its angle from straight up. This tells them which direction to go to reach the flowers with the gold mine of nectar.
Our dancing pales in comparison to the honeybee's waggle dance when it comes to resourcefulness and ingenuity!
My sources for this very entertaining information:
PBS.org (NOVA online) website, Tales From the Hive
askabiologist.asu.edu website, Bee Waggle Dance
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