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Introduces the puzzle of how honeybees coordinate and find food sources without traveling together. It sets up the question of whether bees communicate information about location.
Aristotle was one of the first to document the Intriguing behavior of honeybees how is it for instance that the colony coordinates its workers activity what appears to be a random swarming mass of life may actually be intelligent Behaviora foraging honeybee will eventually discover a new food source such as a freshly blooming flower or artificial feeder placed by a scientist after this visit an interesting thing happens over the next few minutes many other bees arrive atthe same location they don't travel as a group instead each bee finds the food sourceindividually how could these bees who held no previous knowledge of this site suddenly know precisely where the feeder was located is it possible that the animal communicate amongst themselves to answer this question Austrian biologist Carl Fon frish devised
Describes Carl von Frisch's experiments and the observation that bees from different feeders perform distinct dances. The dance angle is shown to correspond to the direction of the food source.
a series of experiments in the 1940s researchers at Georgia Tech have reproduced Fon fish's pioneering experiments using a modern observation Hive two feeders are placed in different directions away from the hive at each location visiting honeybees are markedwith a small spot of painta separate color of paint is used at each station so when a bee returns to the hive it can easily be determined which feeding site it visited before Fon frish other scientists had observed that returning bees tended towaggle about excitedly in a figure eight pattern before sharing the collected pollen and nectar with their hive mates in this two station experiment Fon frish noticed that the bees returning from the same feeding Source danced differently from beesthat arrived from the other location while both sets of bees perform the classic figure8 dance the orientation of the dances is offset between the two groups bees returning from one feeder perform a rotated version of the dance done
by the other bees incredibly the angle of rotation precisely matches the angle between the feeding stations and the hive this must be a clue to the mystery of how the be are able to share information about the location
Explains how bees use polarized light, ultraviolet vision, and an internal clock to locate the sun. These abilities let them translate dance direction into a shared reference system inside the hive.
of food through further experimentation details of the grammar of the honeybees dance language began to emerge the dance exploits two fundamental tools available to the honeybee first their ability to see ultraviolet and polarized light allows them to determinethe location of the Sun at all times ultraviolet light is able to penetrate thick clouds or fog also as light from the sun passes through the atmosphere it's polarized in a direction towards the sun when viewed from theearth devices like polarized film sunglasses or honeybee eyes can detect this orientation and determine the position of the sun even while looking in the opposite direction this gives the bees a type of solar Compass allowing them to alwaysknow the precise position of the sun in the sky a honeybee's entire environment seems to be constantly pointing towards thesun in addition to this solar Compass bees possess a finely tuned internal clock this clock is accurate enough for the Beast to constantly estimate the new position of the sun as it travels across the sky in this way
a honeybee can know the current orientation of the sun Even after spending many hours within a dark Hive they can even take into account changes in Seasons or latitudes inside of a dark vertically oriented beehive the natural sharedreference point is gravity establishing both an up and a down Direction a bee's solar compass and internal clock provides another communal reference point the Sun by pairing these two Global constants the bees form a simple language within thehive the direction up away from Gravity substitutes for the location of the Sun then the angle that the bee dances compared to this up direction is the same angle a bee should fly away from the sun in orderto find the target flower so if the bee dances directly upward other bees know that they can find flowers by flying directly towards the sun if a bee dances 90° to the left then bees leaving the hive should
fly 90° to the left of the Sun a bee angling it dance towards the the ground will let others know to fly directly away from the Sun as the day goes by a bee will even use its internal
Covers how the waggle section of the dance communicates distance to food, with longer dances indicating farther sources. It also notes that wind and other factors can affect the encoded distance.
clock to adjust for the movement of the Sun in the sky this lets fellow workers always know the correct direction to travel in order to find food the central waggle section of the bees dance also contains information aboutthe distance to a food source longer time spent in this part of the dance means that the food is further away shorter durations mean that the food is closer by in general a bee increases the duration of thissection by 1 second for every kilometer of distance to the food when food is within several meters of the hive the central section of the dance will shrink causing a circular
dance for bees distance is actually measured by the amount of energy it takes them to travel thus a strong headwind could cause a bee to dance as if the food came from a further distance away again the informationcontained in a honeybees dance consists of two parts one the orientation of the dance which describes what angle to travel away from the Sun and two the duration of the middle part of the dance which expresses the distanceof a food source away from the hive other information such as quality or abundance of food might also be encoded within other parameters of the dance or in pheromones released by The Bee at Georgia Tech's multi-agent Robotics and
Shifts to the lab's work using computer vision to study collective behavior in living organisms. The closing remarks connect this research to broader insights in animal communication and robotics.
systems laboratory our goal is to work with Scientists to automate the tracking and help understand the organization of multiple autometer by harnessing new computer vision techniques we can more efficiently and effectively study the behavior of large colonies ofliving organisms this information can help us uncover more secrets behind animal communication and lead to Innovations in
robotics