Dancing Bees

The Dancing Bees

Through work in the field something about the reaction of bees to the brilliant colours of flowers, it was easier to believe that a scientist had come to the false conclusion that nature had made an absurd mistake. Since that time I have been constantly drawn back to the world of the bees and ever captivated anew. I have to thank them for hours of the purest joy of discovery, parsimoniously gra...

Dancing with Bees

Hydrocarbons Emitted by Waggle-Dancing Honey Bees Increase Forager Recruitment by Stimulating Dancing

Hydrocarbons emitted by waggle-dancing honey bees are known to reactivate experienced foragers to visit known food sources. This study investigates whether these hydrocarbons also increase waggle-dance recruitment by observing recruitment and dancing behavior when the dance compounds are introduced into the hive. If the hydrocarbons emitted by waggle-dancing bees affect the recruitment of forag...

Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees.

A honeybee's waggle dance is an intriguing example of multisensory convergence, central processing and symbolic information transfer. It conveys to bees and human observers the position of a relatively small area at the endpoint of an average vector in a two-dimensional system of coordinates. This vector is often computed from a collection of waggle phases from the same or different dancers. Th...

How dancing honey bees keep track of changes: the role of inspector bees

Boris Granovskiy, Tanya Latty, Michael Duncan, David J. T. Sumpter, and Madeleine Beekman Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University, Box 480, 751 06 Uppsala, Sweden, Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Lab, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, 2006 New South Wales, Australia, and Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Lab, School of Biological Sciences and...