La storia con il testo
LecturerWhen a honeybee finds a good source of food, she faces a problem. The flowers might be several kilometres away, and her sisters back in the hive have no way of seeing them. So how does she tell them where to go?
LecturerThe answer was worked out in the mid-twentieth century by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who later shared a Nobel Prize for his work. He noticed that returning foragers perform a peculiar figure-of-eight movement on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. In the middle section, the bee runs in a straight line while vibrating her body from side to side. This is the so-called waggle dance.
LecturerThe remarkable thing is that this dance encodes both direction and distance. The angle of the waggle run relative to vertical corresponds to the angle between the food and the sun. If the bee waggles straight upwards, the food lies directly towards the sun. Distance, meanwhile, is conveyed by the duration of the waggle run: the longer the waggle, the further away the food. As a rough guide, each second of waggling represents something in the region of a kilometre, although the exact figure varies between colonies.
LecturerNow, what makes this even more impressive is that the sun moves across the sky during the day. Bees compensate for this, adjusting the angle of their dance as time passes, which implies they have some kind of internal clock.
LecturerWhat this tells us is that symbolic communication, using one thing to represent another that isn't present, is not unique to humans. That said, we should be careful not to overstate the comparison with language. The dance conveys a very limited range of information, and bees can't use it to discuss the past or invent new messages. It's a sophisticated code, but it isn't a conversation.
