The Honey Bee
The Honey Bee. Perhaps the most important insect in the world....without the bees we would not have crops, fruit, vegetables. Things would be grim. Finally there is the waggle dance. Bees communicate by dancing and this was discovered and understood by Karl Ritter von Frisch, an Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973. The "waggle dance" tells about more distant food sources. In order to do this, the dancing bee moves forward a certain distance on the vertically hanging honeycomb in the hive, then traces a half circle to return to her starting point, whereupon the dance begins again. On the straight stretch, the bee "waggles" with her posterior. The direction of the straight stretch contains the information about the direction of the food source, the angle between the straight stretch and the vertical being precisely the angle which the direction of flight has to the position of the sun. The distance to the food so...