Waggles and loops communicate right bee-havior

By Gary Raham
Writer and Illustrator

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I have fought "bee phobia" all of my life. It stems from a frightening childhood experience: while observing a bee pursuing her livelihood at a flower blossom, she took exception to my presence and pursued me. I ran to the back door of our house and slammed the screen door just in time.

The bee buzzed her objections on the other side of the wire barrier while I nursed a grudge. Why should she chase me when I meant her no harm? I totally failed to recognize the fact that she may have considered a large mammal to be a mortal threat. We simply didn't share a common language.

I didn't realize until many years later that it was, in fact, possible to communicate with bees. The groundwork had been laid with the work of a German scientist named Karl von Frisch in the 1940s. At the time of my experience his work was somewhat controversial, but other scientists have confirmed and expanded his conclusions: bees communicate through a combination of sounds humans can't hear directly and an elegant form of dance. To solve the riddle of inter-bee communication scientists had to learn to think, perceive and act like a bee.

What do bees talk about? Observers for thousands of years have known that bees must have some way of talking about food because all members of a hive quickly learn of a new source of nectar.

Von Frisch used the scientific method to watch bee behavior in detail and sort out cause and effect. He knew that critical "bee talk" happened in the hive, so he built a special hive with a glass wall and observed them with red light, which they can't see. After many hours of observation he realized that a worker bee returning from a new source of nectar (like a bowl of sugar water placed in a field) performed a dance for her hive mates consisting of a figure eight loop punctuated with a "waggle" between the loops. The speed and direction of the dance provided details about the size of the new resource and its distance and direction from the hive.

For example, von Frisch found that the speed of a worker's dance was directly proportional to the distance to the nectar. The bee danced faster when the source lay close at wing. The worker communicated direction with the angle of the figure 8 on the hive wall. If she waggled in the dance while facing toward the "ceiling," other workers could find the food by flying directly toward the sun. If she waggled 90 degrees to the left, her hive mates should fly with the sun 90 degrees off their right shoulder.

How were hive mates seeing this behavior in the dark? For many years researchers were unable to make a surrogate bee that could give directions solely by dance. Other bees ignored the dancing bee robots (beebots?).

Enter Wolfgang Kirchner and Axel Michelson. They noted that honeybees can make some sounds with their wings at a lower pitch than the familiar buzzing sound. Other scientists had ignored these sounds as irrelevant, but Kirchner and Michelson also found that bees come equipped with sensors on their antennae (insect ears, in effect) that are attuned to these vibrations. They believed the low pitch sounds from the wings served like a shout: "Hey guys, listen up: important information to follow." They also designed a new beebot to test the theory.

Made of brass and a vibrating plate, their beebot didn't look like a bee, but the other bees understood it perfectly. Kirchner and Michelson succeeded in telling hives of bees how to find pans of sugar water in a field.

It would be nice if such a beebot envoy could have served as a liaison between me and the busy bee that traumatized me years ago, but the message communicated is too specialized. I should have paid attention to the other ways bees talk to us--with brightly colored yellow and black stripes that say, in effect, "back off, idiot. I am armed and dangerous."

My phobia has faded with time and knowledge. As a member of the symbolic language-equipped species, I have communicated with others of my kind who have spent the hours necessary to unravel the secrets of "bee talk." I try to pass the information on to the next generation so they can enjoy a bee's labor without fear. And, if I do from time to time inadvertently offend a bee whose path I cross, I no longer take it quite so personally.

Information on bee language and student directions for talking to bees can be found in Gary Raham's book, "Explorations in Backyard Biology, Drawing on Nature in the Classroom, Grades 4-6," Libraries Unlimited, 1996.