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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The Bee Dance

There is a lot of bee dancing going on around here. Some of it is this lovely stuff above - where the girls dance on the vertical surface of the comb letting everyone know how to get to the motherload they just found. This is cool........the angle of straight part of her dance through the center of her figure 8 in relation to the vertical, is the angle the girls have to fly relative to the position of the sun. So the dance about the same blossoming tree would change during the day as the position of the sun shifted. What wouldn't change is the number of bum waggles, which indicate distance. Cool huh.

The other kind of bee dancing is the solitary, crazy, freaked out head slapping jig I tend to do when a guard bee happens to get stuck in my long hair and starts hysterically buzzing and moving inevitably towards my skull as she frantically tries to escape.

Its a race to see who can kill who first.




5 comments:

Von said...

Not too many of the second we hope.

The Duck Herder said...

Hi Von!

Probably more of the second than one might really like.......!

I am still learning to speak bee, and am not yet able to reliably tell the difference between a guard bee buzzing in my face saying "hello, what are YOU up to?" and "ATTACK ATTACK!". But i will get there!

Jacqueline said...

do you have a floor sheet for that second one?

Marla said...

LOL.....I want video of that one.

Kendra Dolan said...

Appreciate this blogg post