61. New light on dancing bees…

Thanks to the pioneering work of Karl von Frisch, it has long been known that honey bees can signal to their hive-mates both the distance and the direction of a good food source.

They achieve this astonishing feat by means of a curious ‘waggle dance’ they perform on the vertical surface of the hive - in complete darkness. To make sense of the dance, the ‘followers’ need to be able to do two things. They must keep track of the orientation of the ‘dancer’ (this tells them the course that leads to the food source, relative to the sun’s position in the sky) and also monitor the duration of the dance (which indicates how far the bees will have to travel).

For a long time researchers have wondered how the ‘followers’ - who surround the ‘dancer’ on all sides - can keep track of the complicated patterns of the dance in the dark.

Ingenious new research by Anna Hadjitofi and Barbara Webb suggests a possible answer. They seem to use their antennae.

High speed video recordings reveal that the ‘followers’ adjust the angle of their antennae depending on where they stand in relation to the ‘dancer’.

In principle, if the ‘followers’ know the angle of their bodies relative to the ‘dancer’ and can also tell which way they are facing, they might be able to work out how to find the food source.

Two scientists - Hadjitofi and Webb - have shown that navigational circuitry of the kind used by fruit flies would allow honey bees to perform all the necessary navigational calculations. The details are a bit complicated, but for a full explanation, follow this link to the original research.

Since honey bees and fruit flies are very likely to share the very same navigational circuitry, it looks as if they are onto something really important. But further research is needed to confirm the discovery.