13 February 2014
Nature seems like magic. We marvel at nature’s
mysteries. How do the ants communicate and maintain their coordinated and
orderly activities? And the honeybees?
How do bees communicate with each other? How do they identify
different types of flowers? Then, how do they select the flowers with
honey?
It all seems like magic.
But, so does a stage magician’s mind-reading act. The
magician’s assistant mingles with members of the audience who tell the
assistant secrets or show the assistant secret objects. Though too far away to
see or hear anything, the magician seems to guess the secret or the name of the
hidden object -- instantly.
It all seems like magic, but it isn’t.
The magician can actually hear the conversation between the
assistant and the audience members.
How? The assistant is wearing a
hidden microphone and transmitter. In other words, the assistant is “wired for sound” or “wearing a wire.”
Now, some research suggests that honeybees, among
themselves, and together with the help and support of the flowers, have been
fooling us for years. They may have fooled us into believing that they
had some kind of magical instinct. But, all along, they’ve just been
“wearing a wire.”
The bee’s chief form communication is the waggle
dance. The waggle dancing bee informs its audience if, and when, it has
found a rich area full of flowers loaded with honey. And the dance is
also an effort to persuade the rest of the bees to go after the newly
discovered honey.
At least that’s what we always thought was going on.
But, now, we’ve found out something we didn’t know
before. Honeybees generate and pick up
an electrical charge when they fly. The charge is so strong that the
flying honeybee is surrounded by an electrical field. When a bee “talks” to other bees, by dancing,
it can create an electrical field powerful enough to move the antenna of the
other bees “in the audience.” The dancing bee’s electrical field seems to
have a stronger effect when it is combined with sound. What sort of sound? You guessed it. A sound like . . . buzzing.
All this time, scientists have been carefully observing the
waggle dancers’ “steps” (choreography).
But the dancing bee may just be talking to the audience electrically —
sort of like the bee version of a walkie-talkie. Maybe, bees don’t even need
to waggle dance when they “talk.” Maybe,
they just like to waggle when they talk on what is their version of an iPhone.
As if that wasn’t enough of a “buzz-kill” to the magical
mystery of the honeybee’s daily activities, it turns out that the flowers are
“in on the act” as well. Researchers at the University of Bristol found
that, like bees, flowers also have electrical fields. And guess
what? The flowers’ electrical fields seem to communicate information to
bumblebees.
Like an air traffic controller’s computer screen, a flower’s
electrical field seems to tell the bee everything – flower type, volume of
pollen, time of last bee visit, etc. In fact, the flowers’ “transmissions”
tell the bees so much, so quickly, that the bee’s daily activities are
transformed from a maze of complexity into a “no-brainer.” This may all
help to explain the bee’s amazing social organization. Since honey-gathering is so easy with all
this electronic “ground support,” the bees can afford to spend their abundant
spare time organizing the hive. What
else do they have to do?
So, in the end, we may find that yet another one of nature’s
magical veils has fallen away. In the
past, researchers spent years studying the bees’ elaborate dance-moves and the
flowers’ colors, shapes, and odor. But
the dances, decorations, and perfumes may turn out to have been just a
distraction -- “smoke and mirrors” – concealing nature’s version of “on board
computers” that handle everything.
Bee
Buzz Creates Electric Field That Helps Insects Communicate
M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville,
Illinois
13 February 2014
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