1945: Dancing bees - The book of science

Dancing bees
Dialects
Language
Commentary

Dancing bees

On a honeybee’s sense of smell,
its color vision
its sensitivity to ultraviolet,
its sense of light polarization,
its internal clock,
its sensitivity to odors,
including pheromones,
its ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field
and its sense of gravity
On a honeybee’s ability to dance,
to circle,
to waggle its abdomen,
in the precise direction,
for the precise duration
and the right number of times
Lets it communicate with its mates
what food source to find and where
and on this depends the health of the hive
as Karl von Frisch was able to show
with carefully controlled experiments.

Dialects

Von Frisch studied
Apis Mellifera Carnica,
also known as the Carniolan bee,
which speaks Slovenian.
The language of the bee
varies greatly between varieties.
Could we say Apis mellifera ligustica
speaks Italian? Apis mellifera mellifera
speaks German? Apis mellifera iberiensis
speaks Spanish? Apis mellifera cecropia
speaks Greek? Apis cerana nuluensis
speaks Bornean? Apis cerana indica
speaks Burmese? Apis cerana cerana
speaks Vietnamese?
What Bible student
would have thought
that bees were also banned
from the Tower of Babel?

Language

If bees could talk, then would they tell
of their strange world, or would they think
every thing that lives can dance, know,
without thinking, the direction of the sun,
and feel the electric fields of their excitement?
If you would listen then I would tell you
something that you didn’t know, using words
that might seem familiar, but the dear thoughts
of other creatures, if we can call them thinkers,
are spoken in an unexpected tongue.

Honey bees can see in colors in the ultraviolet, so they get more visual information from flower petals than we get. Bees in the hive can tell by the smell what kind of flower another bee has visited. Bees know their directions by the position of the sun, by the polarization of sunlight, and by the earth’s magnetic field. Given directions in a dark hive to a food source relative to the sun, a bee knows the direction even hours later, compensating for the change in the sun’s position.