NJSLA Practice Test 3

Dancing Directions: How Honeybees Share the Way to Food

¹A Message in the Dark A honeybee returns to her hive after finding a patch of flowers rich with nectar. Inside, the hive is nearly pitch dark, and thousands of her sisters are crowded onto the wax combs. She cannot point, and she cannot draw a map. Yet within minutes, other bees leave the hive and fly toward the same flowers, sometimes more than a mile away. How do they know where to go?

²The answer is a dance. For nearly a hundred years, scientists have studied how this dance works—and tested whether it really carries a message.

³Reading the Dance The returning bee, called a forager, performs what scientists call the waggle dance. She runs a short, straight line across the comb while shaking her body rapidly from side to side. Then she circles back to her starting point and runs the same line again, looping first to the right and then to the left. She may repeat the pattern dozens of times.

⁴The direction of the straight run tells the other bees which way to fly. Bees use the sun as a reference point. If the forager runs straight up the comb, the flowers lie in the same direction as the sun. If she runs at an angle 40 degrees to the right of straight up, the flowers lie 40 degrees to the right of the sun. Because the comb hangs straight up and down, “up” on the comb stands for the sun’s position in the sky.

⁵The length of the waggle run tells how far away the food is. The longer the forager waggles during each straight run, the farther the other bees must fly. In many colonies, each second of waggling stands for roughly one kilometer of flight, though the exact amount differs from colony to colony. The chart below shows approximate values for one colony.

⁶Bees that follow the dance cannot see it in the dark hive. Instead, they press close to the dancer and touch her with their antennae. They also pick up the scent of the flowers clinging to her body and feel the vibrations she makes with her wings. Then these new bees, called recruits, leave the hive and fly off on their own to find the flowers.

⁷A Scientist Who Watched Closely The first person to explain the dance was Karl von Frisch, an Austrian scientist who studied bees for more than fifty years. Von Frisch set out dishes of sugar water at different distances and directions from his hives. He marked the visiting bees with tiny dots of paint so he could tell them apart. Then he spent hour after hour at glass-walled hives, watching what the marked bees did when they returned home.

⁸Slowly, a pattern appeared. When he moved a dish farther away, the dancers’ waggle runs grew longer. When he moved it in a new direction, the angle of the runs shifted to match. Von Frisch published his findings in the 1940s, and in 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about animal behavior.

⁹Doubters and Tests Not everyone was convinced. In the 1960s, a scientist named Adrian Wenner argued that recruits might find flowers by smell alone, without using the dance’s directions at all. His challenge was a fair one. After all, bees do pick up scents from the dancer. Could the dance simply be a bee’s way of getting attention?

¹⁰Over the next several decades, scientists designed new experiments to find out. Around 1990, a team of European researchers built a small robot bee and moved it through the waggle dance inside a real hive. Recruits that followed the robot tended to show up at feeding spots in the direction its dance pointed. Then, in 2005, scientists in England attached tiny radar tags to bees that had followed a dance and tracked their flights. The bees flew in the direction the dance indicated and traveled about the right distance before they began searching. Decades after von Frisch first sat beside his glass hives, new tools had confirmed what his patient watching revealed.

¹¹Scent still matters; it helps recruits recognize the right flowers once they arrive. But a honeybee’s dance, it is now clear, is a real set of directions, written in movement instead of words.