Famously industrious, bees are always engaged in some useful activity or other – even if it’s just dancing in the dark, as Bill Anderson explains

In 1973, Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the waggle dance of the honeybee. He worked out how a bee returning to the hive from a source of nectar or pollen could share with her sisters the location of that food source and its quality through a buzzing, figure-of-eight dance – a vital social communication for the continuing survival of the colony.

In observing the waggle dance, using specially adapted equipment, Frisch had witnessed something almost no bee ever sees. That’s because the dance takes place on the surface of the honeycomb inside the hive – in complete darkness. The bees receiving the information from the dancer become dance-followers, like humans joining an unfamiliar line dance. They copy the moves of the dance to decode the data it contains. But while we would need to see our line-dancing tutor, the bees pick up their new moves by feeling the vibrations of the dance that resonate through the wax of the hexagonal comb beneath their feet.

The frequency of the vibrations the bees use to dance their data in the dark is, unsurprisingly, perfectly tuned to the structure of the wax. This rate (primarily around 250Hz) enables efficient transmission through the honeycomb structure, with the wax amplifying the signal – which is important in such a busy and densely populated space.

Now, conventional beekeeping  presents a problem here. The familiar wooden frames utilised to contain the honeycomb for convenience significantly dampen any frequencies above 170Hz, thereby muffling the waggle dance. Whereas the open, unframed comb in idle beekeepers’ hives actually helps to amplify the signal – the vital information about food is effortlessly allowed to travel further and clearer.

And recently it was observed that bees too far away to be able to feel any clear dance vibrations were still somehow alerted to a nearby dancer – which begs the question: in a bustling crowded workplace, how did they know there was a dance going on and where to join it?

For all the dance-followers inside the waggle vibration zone, as they straddle the wax rims of the comb to copy the dance moves, the rims of each hexagonal cell all predictably move together: left and right, to and fro as the whole cell is moved by the vibration. But beyond this data zone, at a particular distance, higher-frequency 270Hz vibrations cause a phase change which makes the opposite rims of the hexagonal cells behave completely differently – they move towards and away from each other.

A passing bee straddling these rims would feel something toe-catching: cells contracting and expanding move their legs together and apart. (This brings to mind the famous dance move from the 1920s called the Bees Knees where by switching the position of your hands on your knees as they part and come together, the illusion is created of the knees passing through each other and swapping over.) By briefly following the curve of the circular path of the phase-changing hexagonal cells, our passing bee can quickly ascertain the direction of the central source, head straight for the principal choreographer, and join in the dance.

This article is from Idler #109.

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