The Bee Dance

(Inside Science ) -- James Nieh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego says, “I study all different kinds of social bees because you really need to look at social bees to study their communication. I look at honeybees, bumblebees, and stingless bees.”

“Honeybees have this amazing ability to communicate, and it's one of the reasons why I became a biologist, because I discovered as an undergraduate that they could communicate using a waggle dance,” said Nieh.

“So a bee that dances inside the nest, let's say she goes out to find a good food source. She'll find that flower, and if it's rewarding enough, she'll come back, and she'll do this dance that almost looks like a figure 8 of a bee dancing back and forth and then waggling her butt, if you will, her abdomen. And that waggling is key because the angle at which she's waggling and the duration of time she spends doing it actually tells bees where to go to find food,” said Nieh.

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