Film shows wiggle dance of the pollen forager and bee work in the spring beginning
To celebrate the release of the Cities episode of Planet Earth II, Maddie Moate went down to East London to meet the beekeeper Chris from Barnes & Webb who manages a selection of beehives across the city. Maddie finds out how bees find food in urban environments and how, through the waggle dance, they are able to communicate with their fellow bees, where food can be found.
Bees have developed a highly elaborate language
Bee dances have become legendary. They may seem complicated, but they were deciphered by Karl von Frisch in the 19th century. These dances are an evolutionary response to competition and limitations in foraging resources.
Imagine a bee colony that sends out foragers in all directions randomly. While this would allow them to find new food sources, what would happen if there was an exceptional food source 1 km away, such as a blooming black locust tree? Only a small number of foragers would find this spot by flying randomly from the hive, even if the colony sent out all its bees on a search. Recruitment dances of bees change this dramatically. A single forager that finds an abundant food source informs her sisters and then flies back for another load. Meanwhile, the workers alerted by the dance fly out and quickly locate the food. Within a few recruitment flight cycles, every bee returning from that tree to the hive can recruit dozens of others. Thus, in a short time, all available foraging forces head towards the chosen blooming tree.
Efficient way of communication …
This is a very efficient way of communicating and gathering food. It prevents pointless search flights, which consume a lot of energy. About 5% of all foragers act as scouts, while the rest wait for a signal or collect from a selected abundant food source.
Another dance is the round dance, performed by foragers when food is less than 75 meters away. This dance encourages observing bees to search for food in the vicinity of the hive without indicating a specific direction.
In addition to recruitment dances, bees can recruit each other for specific tasks in the hive, such as comb building, nectar processing, or caring for the young. They nudge their companions or shake their bodies to draw attention. How this translates into the recruited bee performing a specific task has not been fully studied.
A specific navigation method is pheromone navigation, used by a flying swarm or lost workers. When a lost worker finds her way back to the hive, she lifts her abdomen, exposes the Nasonov gland at the tip, and fans her wings to release a distinctive scent, attracting other lost workers. Sometimes this behavior is quite spectacular.
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