PSSA Practice Test 2

Dancing Directions

¹A honeybee that finds a patch of flowers full of sweet nectar has a problem. Thousands of her sisters back at the hive could help gather the food, but she cannot point, draw a map, or say a word. Instead, she dances.

²A Hive Full of Workers A honeybee colony can have tens of thousands of bees. Most of them are female worker bees. Younger workers stay inside the hive, where they clean, build wax comb, and care for young bees. Older workers become foragers. Foragers fly out to collect nectar and pollen from flowers. A forager may visit hundreds of flowers on a single trip.

³Finding good flowers takes time and energy, so the whole colony benefits when one forager can tell the others exactly where to go. Scientists call the message she gives the waggle dance.

⁴The Waggle Dance When a forager returns from a rich patch of flowers far from the hive, she climbs onto the comb among the crowd of bees. She runs forward in a straight line while shaking her body rapidly from side to side. This straight part is called the waggle run. At the end of the run, she circles back to her starting point, first to one side and then to the other. Then she does the waggle run again and again. Her path looks like a figure eight.

⁵The other bees press close to her. It is dark inside the hive, so they cannot watch the dance the way we would. Instead, they feel her movements with their antennae and pick up the scent of the flowers on her body.

⁶Directions in the Dark The waggle run gives two important pieces of information. The first is direction. Bees use the sun as a guide. The comb hangs straight up and down, so the dancer uses "up" on the comb to stand for the direction of the sun. If she waggles straight up the comb, the flowers are in the same direction as the sun. If she waggles a little to the right of straight up, the flowers are a little to the right of the sun.

⁷The second piece of information is distance. The longer the waggle run lasts, the farther away the flowers are. A short waggle means the food is fairly close. A long waggle means the bees have a long flight ahead of them.

⁸For flowers very close to the hive, foragers usually do a simpler dance, circling in small loops without a long waggle run. This "round dance" tells the other bees that food is nearby and that they should search the area close to home.

⁹Cracking the Code For hundreds of years, beekeepers saw bees dancing, but no one knew what the dances meant. Karl von Frisch, an Austrian scientist, studied bees for many years to find out. He set out dishes of sugar water at different distances and directions from a hive. Then he marked the bees that visited each dish with tiny dots of paint and watched how they danced when they returned. Again and again, the direction and length of the waggle run matched the location of the dish.

¹⁰Von Frisch's discovery changed how people think about insects. It showed that a creature with a brain smaller than a grain of rice can share exact information with others. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Prize, one of the highest honors in science, for his discoveries about animal behavior.