Montshire Minute: Bee Dances

Originally aired during the week of June 18, 2001

Monday

Worker bees are on the fast track when it comes to career advancement. At three days old, the workers are already pitching in, cleaning the hive and feeding larvae. At ten days old, they begin collecting nectar brought into the hive by more experienced worker bees. And by three weeks, the workers become foragers themselves. These are the bees we see most often outside, darting among the flowers. Each bee is a specialist, taking nectar and pollen from only one type of flower. This is what makes bees such effective pollinators - each one carry pollen from blossom to blossom, insuring that the plants they depend on will continue to reproduce. To make a single pound of honey, a hive of 550 bees may visit more than 2.5 million flowers.

Tuesday

Making honey is a sweet science known only to bees. How do they do it? Bees gather nectar from clover, dandelion, and other plant blossoms. Nectar is mostly water, with some complex sugars mixed in - the worker honeybee sucks up this liquid its tube-like tongue. The bee may visit hundreds of blossoms on one trip, until she has gathered almost her own weight in nectar. Then she'll buzz back to the hive and pass the load on to other worker bees. But that's only the half of it. The house workers then mix the nectar with their saliva. The bees dry the mixture by fanning it with their wings. The liquid honey that results is stored inside the beeswax honeycombs. The honey serves as a high-energy fuel to keep the hive going through the rest of the summer and winter months.

Wednesday

To insure that the bee colony survives, specialized worker bees called scouts locate sources of food and tell the other bees where to find it. The sweet nectar that bees extract from blossoms is brought back into the hive and passed on to house workers. These bees "chew" the nectar, releasing enzymes that make the nectar more digestible and protect it from bacteria. The bees secrete the nectar into the honeycombs. The six-sided shape of each cell is constructed to hold the largest amount of honey for the smallest amount of wax used. The bees fan the liquid with their wings, causing it to dry and thicken. Finally, each cell is sealed by a waxy cap. The flavor and color of honey depend on the types of flowers used as a source of nectar.

Thursday

Maybe you've done the waltz. Maybe you've done the watusi. But have you ever done the honeybee? I'll bet you haven't. It's a dance that takes beehives by storm every spring, when worker bees leave the hive to gather nectar and produce honey. Forager bees have the job of locating a good source of food - namely plant blossoms. When the forager hits paydirt, she returns to the hive and communicates to her fellows the precise location of the food. She does it by dancing. If the food is relatively close to the hive she does a round dance, circling alternately to her left and her right. She dances more vigorously if the food source is especially plentiful. If the blossoms are further away, she may do a "waggle dance." This dance is done in the shape of a figure eight, during which she really shakes her booty - er, waggles her abdomen. Watch the activity in the Montshire's very own see-through beehive this summer!

Friday

The honeybee may only have a brain the size of a grass seed. But it is a master of non-verbal communication. We know that worker honeybees indicate the distance of a food source to the rest of the hive by doing a complex dance. Bees even have different dialects. Researcher Karl Von Frisch found that bees from Austria used a "waggle dance" to indicate food sources located up to 275 feet away. But in Italy, the same dance was used to mark distances of only 120 feet. In the darkness of the hive, bees use other senses including smell and sound. Forager bees carry the scent of particular blossoms they've visited when they enter the hive. Bees can also inform fellow workers which direction to fly in. If the food source is twenty degrees to the right of the sun, the bee will do her waggle dance twenty degrees to the right of the vertical axis of the hive. Not your ordinary insect!