Waggle Dance

A detailed Summary of Waggle Dance

In every bee hive there are three types of bees, a queen, drones, and many workers. The lone queen honeybee is a fertile female, while the drone honeybees are males that are exclusively used for reproduction. It is the many worker honeybees, infertile females, that are responsible for foraging for food.

For hundreds of years biologists and naturalists have noticed that the worker honeybees do not all go out to search for food at the same time, but rather send out scouts ahead. These scout honeybees locate the food, return to the hive, and then the rest of the workers go to collect the rest of the food. Many scientists, dating back to Aristotle, have been baffled by how the worker bees are able to locate the food sought out by the scouts. How do the scout and worker honeybees communicate in the hive to alert each other where to forage for the food?

In 1943, an Austrian entomologist, Karl von Frisch hypothesized that the scouts were able to communicate the necessary information to the other worker bees by moving in specific patterns after returning to the hive. He called this movement the "waggle dance". Karl von Frisch said that the waggle dance of the honeybee was able to communicate t

Before he published his findings, Karl von Frisch spent years experimenting and recording observations to try and solve the mystery of honeybee communication. He started by placing a dish filled with sugar water a short distance from a bee hive. He noticed that immediately after placing the dish outside, the dish was swarmed with many honeybees. As the dish continued to empty, increasingly less honeybees came to it. However, if he refilled the dish and one of the bees came to it, then a short while later the dish was once again swarmed with bees. He concluded from this that the scout bees must communicate the information regarding the food to the worker bees when returning to the hive. In order to try and understand how the bees communicated, Karl von Frisch and his colleagues built a transparent bee hive. They marked the scout bees with red dye on the thorax, and observed that when the scout bees returned to the hive it began to do a series of "dances" that where immediately followed by many worker honeybees swarming to the food source. Karl von Frisch concluded from this that this "dance" which he observed was the form of communication between the honeybees.

Wenner suggested that the other worker bees were able to recognize the specific dance of the scout bee, not by "seeing" the dance, but by "hearing" and sensing the dance. He said, that when the scout performed the dance it caused vibrations through the hive which conveyed the dance's information to the surrounding worker bees. As well, Wenner observed that the bees also emitted very low frequency buzzing. He theorized that although the waggle dance is used to convey information regarding food between honeybees, it is only understood and communicated through vibrations.

Although Karl von Frisch's theories on honeybee communication are widely accepted among the scientific community, there are many respected biologists and entomologists who do not agree with Frisch's theories. Many argue that although it appears that there is a direct connection between the scout bees dance and the recruitment of other worker bees to forage for food, there is not enough conclusive evidence that the dances contain as much information as Frisch ,and his successors, give credit for. It can be said, that the dances are just used in order to get the other worker bees attention, and the only communication is when the scout bee actually gives the other worker bees a sample of the nectar. After receiving the nectar, the other worker bees leave the hive, and are able to locate the food source by following floral aromas.

There are many different theories as to how worker honeybees communicate. The most respected and proven theory being Karl von Frisch's waggle dance. Frisch's theory, along with later experimental evidence by Wenner, Esch, Burns, Michelsen, Kirchner, and Tautz, shows that the scout honeybees communicate and recruit other worker honeybees to forage for food through specific dances. The dances contain information on the direction, distance, and type of food, and are conveyed through both the actual dancing as well as through vibrations. Many factors, such as outside scenery and the location in the hive where the dance is performed, effect the accuracy and success in conveying the necessary information to the other worker bees. Although not all scientists agree with this theory, it is the only conclusive attempt to understand honeybee communication that has been proven through many different experiments by many d

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2357
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Science