Honeybees decode the waggle dance by applying simple maths
October 6th, 2008 - 6:15 pm ICT by ANI - Send to a friend:London, Oct 6 (ANI): Honeybees do a waggle dance to guide other hive-mates towards nectar-rich flowers, and scientists have now revealed that the bees in the hive actually apply maths to deduce the direction, according to a new study.
In an experiment, David Tanner and Kirk Visscher from the University of California, Riverside, have shown that bees trained to visit artificial sugar-traps flew off in a direction that more closely matched the mean angle of several waggles, instead of flying on the angle of any one waggle
“Bees apparently keep a mental log of the directions indicated in the dance. I find it remarkable that, with a relatively simple brain, they can do something so mathematically complex,” New Scientist magazine quoted Tanner as saying.
According to Tom Seeley at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who has studied several aspects of honeybee societies, the study has shown convincing results.
But, he added, its not just the waggle that the honeybees use for deciding their flight direction.
He suggested that they might also take their cue from bees returning to the hive, “for example by orienting to the flights of these bees as they flew to or from the feeder”. (ANI)
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November 24th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Since Von Frisch discovered the meaning of the dances, a lot of scientists repeated and extended, for so many years, the experimental research to arrive at the conclusion that “the dance is a mysterious coded language”. By the dance, the dancing bee brings the bees ‘lookers on’ into a position or a level that remains present over the entire cycle, hive food-source hive.
In a new approach one finds that the two families of overlapping dances, the round dances and the figure eight pattern dances, correspond with two families of periodic orbits in a to the plane restricted three-body-problem. See: users@telenet.be/thedanceofthebees/
When the source of food is nearby the bee cannot distinguish the hive from the food-source, the more the food-source is far away the more this food-source behaves as a very distinguishable point.