The dance of honey bees is meaningless to those who neglect

There are many things to say about the bees' flexible dance, a sly dance that helps honey bees to inform the same animals when they find a source of food.

Jump - the practice of eight bees in a zigzag shape - provides an indication of the direction and distance of the flowers to help other bees locate. The only problem is: a lot of bees seem to ignore this information. Instead, scientists in Argentina have found that bees rely on their own memories to find food.

Besides the dance steps that provide information about the location, each bee carries the scent of the flower that it has come. The scent also affects bees: if the insects have not gone for food for a few days, the scent motivates them to continue their work, often at the source of food they have previously visited.

So the question arises for Walter M. Farina of the University of Buenos Aires with his colleague Christoph Grüter and M. Sol Balbuena is what happens if a bee's dance causes a conflict: The dance provides information about geography. new points, but the floral scent reminds bees to keep track of food sources in another location. So what do the bees watching the dance do?

(Photo: Chris Gash)

In their experiments, the researchers found that in most cases, bees came with a familiar source of food. Dr. Farina wrote in an e-mail: 'They are based on their memory in those cases and ignore the information provided by other bees' .

Scientists also discovered that even if the unfamiliar scent (bees with no memories of the place) the dance only urged them to return to the familiar food source, not a new food source.

Dr. Farina said that the study published in the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences report found that despite the high sociality of a bee colony, personal information in the memory of each bee is often the most important. . The information of the dance is only useful for first-time bees to feed or those that have been inactive for a long time.