Quote: "The obvious features of honeybee communication have been reportedly widely and now are a familiar story. When a foraging bee finds a source of food, it flies back to the hive and conveys to its fellows the distance and direction of the source. In the course of doing so it performs a waggling "dance" in which it traces a figure eight. The orientation and rate of the dance, it has been supposed, tells the location of the food source. This hypothesis runs into an awkward difficulty: the interior of most hives is dark so the bees probably cannot see the dance. Investigators of this phenomenon have found, however, that the bees follow the dance by means of their antennae, which touch the dancer's body. ... Perhaps the honeybee communicated with its fellows not only by the dance movement but also by sound signals! To test this possibility I made tape recordings of the sounds made by dancing bees... A careful analysis showed that the average length of the sound trains during a given dance was directly proportional to the distance the bee had traveled to the food source. The correlation was so good that it seems altogether likely - certainly as likely as any other proposed mechanism - that the bee reports the distance by means of this sound language." Adrian Wenner. Scientific American. April 1964 submitted by Peter Borst Apiary Technician Dyce Honeybee Lab Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 [log in to unmask]