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
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