1. Ever since the discovery in the 1940s that bees performed a dance to direct other bees to the location of a food source, scientists have debated how the bees transmit such information. Some assumed that the specific scent of the location clings to a bee; then worker bees would sniff and follow. Others believed that a more sophisticated means of communication exists among bees. It finally turns out that the latter camp is correct-the lowly bee has a very advanced neurological system.
2. Harald Esch, a professor of biology at the university of Notre Dame in Indiana, hypothesized that bees registered distances to food sources by keeping track of the number of the number of landmarks they passed, such as rocks, trees. or groupings of flowers. They then passed the information along through their dance.
3. To test the idea, Esch and his team tried to deceive bees into giving false information to hive mates. They started by setting a cup of syrup about 36 feet from a hive and let a honeybee eat from the cup. Instead of letting the bee fly directly to the hive and blck, they forced it to fly through a 10-foot-long plastic tunnel lined with a random pattern of half-inch black and white squares. According to Esch, the desing was intended to trick the bee into thinking it had covered much more territory than it actually had by increasing the number of landmarks-black squares-it was exposed to.
4. Esch’s team videotaped the bee’s dance when it returned to the hive, and then calculated the distance which the bee communicated based on the duration of the dance. “The bee danced as if it had traveled about 70 meters (230 feet), rather than just 11 meters (36 feet),” says Esch. When some 200 bees flew from the hive, searching for food over the next two hours, about three-quarters of them approached a dry feeding station 230 feet away looking for nectar, rather the loaded feeding station close to the hive.
5. Based on these results, Esch says there is no question that honeybees communicate distance depending on what they see rather than how they smell. “Although I would certainly hesitate to call this a language, it certainly is an abstract from of communication,” he says. “And it lays the old argument to rest once and for all.”