When a bee loses sleep

Nobody works well when tired, and insects are no exception. Like humans, bees when sleepiness becomes a bad dancer and a poor communicator, according to New Scientist magazine.

Similar to humans, European honey bees, scientifically known as Apis mellifera, often sleep 8 hours a night.

Honey bee Apis mellifera. (Photo: Wikimedia)

In order to find out how a good sleep is important for waggling dancing to exchange information from bees, expert Barrett Klein of the University of Texas in Austin and test partners harassing sleep of a group of 50 bees.

To do this, Klein attached magnetic pieces to 25 bees and non-magnetic pieces of copper on the remaining bees. Throughout the night, from the twilight to the morning, the expert kept moving the magnet back and forth above the honeycomb, causing 25 bees to be attached to steel and pushing against each other and unable to 'take a nap '.

When the team watched the video recording the bees' activity the next day, they found that insomnia bees performed less accurately than the bees that had enough sleep (the ones that were attached copper piece not affected by magnets). As a result, information on the direction and distance to the food source encoded in the insomnia bees are misunderstood by the same type.