Word: beeing
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When parents tell their children about the birds and the bees, they leave out the information that the male bee always dies after making love. This is surely a touchstone metaphor for at least a part of mankind. Yet until now, it has not been put across with wide-angle clarity. It has remained...
When he thought he knew enough about the bees' talking dance. Dr. Esch rigged up an artificial bee and stuck it in a hive to repeat a dance that had been performed by a live scout bee. At the proper moment, a tiny loudspeaker emitted the proper recorded sounds. A ring of workers followed the performance with apparent interest, and Dr. Esch hoped that they would fly out of the hive to find the nectar described by the simulated scout...
Zoologist Harald Esch of the University of Munich stumbled on the information while performing an elaborate experiment on bee dances. Prompted by curiosity, he poked a small microphone into the hive while a scout was making her dancing report. "I got the surprise of my life," he says. "Blasting out of the earphones came a loud 'thththrrrr.' followed by a short 'beep.' Then some of the worker bees flew out of the hive. I knew I had hit on something entirely...
Stirring Up the Workers. A little more observation showed that the whirring sounds were made by the scout bee just as she went into a tail-wagging dance, but two years of work were needed to translate the meaning of the new code of sound. Dr. Esch finally decided that the length of the sounds reported the distance to the nectar supply. The pitch of the sounds and the intervals between them told its quality and quantity. Made with slight nonflying movements of wings, the sounds seemed to stimulate the watching workers to fly toward the new-found food...
...nectar that she has found. Dr. Esch's artificial scout went right on dancing after the beep was sounded. This made the workers so suspicious that one of them stabbed her. When Dr. Esch learned to stop the dummy's dance after the first beep, the artificial bee was not stabbed...