A JOURNEY TO THE WORLD OF INSECTS COMMUNICATION( PART 3)

Incase you missed the previous part (fireflies communication system) link is here: A JOURNEY TO THE WORLD OF INSECTS COMMUNICATION( PART 2)

BEES

If I ask you to dance without music. Will you? Oh no! A little bit awkward, right? But you know what bees do this. They dance without music. Why? Don't they have musical instruments? The answer is that,why music is needed to them while communicating with each other. Yeah! Dancing is a communication system of them.

Whenever a bee goes out foraging and finds a flower full of powdery pollens it heads back to hive to tell others. It never says , " Hey Guys! I've Found An Effective Source."  Instead it dances! The dance bears fruitful information about the source.

The waggle dance and the round dance are two forms of dance behaviour. When the food source is about 25-30 metres away from the hive the bee starts a round dance in front of its fellows. It walks in a circle, turns around then walks the same circle in the opposite direction. It repeats this many times. But by this dance they can only express the distance of the flower, not the direction to it.  Wanna dance like a bee?

Whatever the waggle dance includes both distance and direction to the flower. The bee starts a waggle dance when the source is out of 100 metres. It waggles back and forth moving in a straight line then circle around to repeat the dance. The length in the middle line called 'The waggle run'. What's cool is that length of this waggle run varies and it varies way that's precisely related to bee travel distance. Closer destination,  shorter waggle!  In general a bee increases the duration of this section by one second for every kilometer of distance to the food.

Now, distance is clear. But what about direction?  Which direction its fellows  need to go? The angle of the waggle run tells where to keep the Sun in the sky while they  travel. If the bee dances directly upward, other bees know they can find flowers by flying directly towards the Sun. If it dances 60 degree to the left,  then bees leaving the hive should fly 60 degree to the left of Sun. Again bees angling its distance towards the ground will let others know to fly directly away from the Sun.

Thus their grammar is related to the Sun!  But how they can determine the location of the sun at all times? Indeed they have the ability to see ultraviolet rays and polarized light. A question comes to mind, what will happen on overcast days when bees can't see the sun?  Will they stop searching nectars? Sit idly without doing any work?

No! Experiments have shown that bees know where the sun is even when they can't see it. They do have an internal representation of the Sun's path through the sky and this image is partially innate and partially learned!

After all looking for a motivation?
Yeah, here bees motivating you to
"Find Your Purpose And Start Living It"


So, our journey to the world of insects communication ends here. At the end of the  journey are you feeling a kind of thrill? Actually the relation between human and insects can be compared to the relation between alien and human! Just think- if an alien comes to the earth from another planet, our behaviour would seem blur and puzzling to it without knowing our languages and customs. The same thing happens when we study insects communication. But research is ongoing! The more we know about it, the more we will know about the new world, insects world! Maybe that's probably why aliens are researching us and we are researching insects!             

Follow us on Facebook : Contagious Intelligence

Or

Join our Facebook group : Contagious Intelligence

Want to join us? Here's the membership form - Membership Form