What is Bee "Dancing"?

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Bees need to communicate with each other to pass on the location of food sources. To do this bees have evolved a unique dance language that can be understood by us. A worker bee returning from a rich source of food will ‘dance’ on the vertical comb surface by running in a circle, on each revolution the bee will bisect the circle at an angle. The angle with respect to 12 O’clock represents the angle to fly with respect to the sun.

If the bee ran from 6 to 12 O‘clock i.e. straight up, this would say fly directly towards the sun ‘.

And 7 to 1 O’clock would mean fly just to the right of the sun, 12 to 6 O’clock ‘Fly directly away from the sun’. In other words the bees translate the angle to the sun as an angle to the vertical.

To represent distance the bee ‘wiggles’ its abdomen whist crossing the circle, the more wiggles the greater the distance.

So a bee will ‘say’ to it’s friends ‘Fly over there for about a 1 mile and you will find something that tastes like this’. Pretty Smart !

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