He has a dance signaling death

After discovering hidden flowers that contain hazards, honeybees fly to the nest and perform a dance to warn of their fellow humans.

Honey bees keep away from dangerous flowers.Photo: irtc.org.

According to the BBC, the bee's body dance is an amazingly effective communication method. When the rapier bees return to the nest, they shake their bodies in a rather complicated dance. Biologists have deciphered that dance.

Just by looking at the corner and the direction of the bee returning, other bees can tell which direction they should fly and how far they can go to reach the bile-rich flowers.

BBC said, Kevin Abbott and Reuven Dukas - two experts of McMaster University (Canada) - recently discovered that the body dance of honey bees also has a function. That is a dangerous warning.

To prove it, they trained honey bees to regularly fly to two artificial flowers with honey. Whenever the bee sucked in the honey, two experts poured more honey into it. After the bees were used to feeding on two flowers, the team placed two honey bees on a flower so that the living bees could see. The position of the dead bee does not affect the bile extraction work of living bees.

The two researchers used a camera to monitor the bee's reaction when it saw the corpse on the flower. They also put cameras near the hive to track the movements of the bees when they return to the nest.

The results showed that bees do not pass into the flower with the same type of corpse but still perform the body dance when returning to the nest. It is noteworthy that the bees returning from the 'safe' flower perform 20-30 times more body dancing than those flying from the same-type flower. Then no bees fly to the "dangerous" flower.

This shows that bees recognize flowers that contain dangers - where they can be killed or eaten by predators. They will perform less dances if they encounter dangerous flowers so others can avoid them.

Research by Abbott and Dukas is published in Animal Behavior magazine.