Word: hives
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...each hive commune, says Dr. von Frisch, a few bees are honey scouts. They patrol the neighborhood looking for new-opened flowers. Their big, compound eyes see well, but they do not see what human eyes see. Blind to red, a bee sees a clear red flower as grey. But at the other end of its color spectrum, a bee can see ultraviolet, to which human eyes are blind...
Glad Tidings. There the bee unlimbers its sense of taste, which is specialized to test the quality of nectar. A sugar content of 5% does not interest a bee; such nectar would spoil in the hive before it could be concentrated into long-keeping honey. A 20% sugar content is satisfactory, and 40% makes the bee wildly enthusiastic. It sucks up some nectar and marks the flower with its own scent from a gland on its abdomen. Having thus staked a claim, it heads back to the hive to spread the glad news...
When the scout bee enters the hive, he says, it climbs to a section of comb and starts a stylized dance. Other bees gather around, caressing the scout with their touch-and-smell antennae. The scout bee's odor, picked up from the flower it has robbed, tells them what sort of flower they should look...
...dance has meaning, too. If the scout bee dances on the same spot, whirling first to the right, then to the left, it is telling the other bees that a honey source lies close to the hive. As they swarm out eagerly to look for it, the scout bee goes to another comb to tell the news to still more of its hive-mates...
Wags for Distance. To tell about sources 100 meters or more from the hive, the scout bee does another dance. It wags its abdomen from side to side, runs forward a few steps, turns around, runs forward and wags again. The more rapid the turning and wagging, the closer the honey lies. Dr. von Frisch fed scout bees at varied distances from the hive and timed the tempo of their dancing. He found that when they made nine or ten complete dance cycles in 15 seconds, it meant that the honey flowers were 100 meters away. Seven cycles meant...