Articles

Why Bees Dance For Their Honey

by Anonymous

In the early 1900s, Austrian naturalist Karl von Frisch discovered that bees express themselves by dancing.

To indicate a food source that is too distant from the hive to be smelled or seen, the scout bee dances on the honeycomb in the hive. Other bees gather around and follow the dancer. They imitate her movements (all dancing worker bees are female), and note the fragrance of the flowers from which she gathered the nectar.

If the food source is within about 50 meters (160 feet) of the hive, the bee does a circular dance on the honeycomb. If the new source of nectar or pollen is distant, the scout does a figure-eight dance. The distance at which the changeover takes place, from round dance to figure eight, varies between subspecies of bees. This does not cause confusion, because the distance is constant within each hive.

Every movement has meaning

The scout's every movement has meaning for the other bees.

The direction and angle the dancing bee cuts across the diameter of the circle reveal the direction of the food. If she wiggles across the circle straight up, the watching bees know they can find the food by flying towards the sun. If the dancing bee cuts across the circle at an angle, the others know they must fly to the right or left of the sun at the same angle the dancer moved to the right or left of an imagined vertical line.

The dance of the figure eight is also used when bees are selecting a new homesite. Any worker bee who finds a potential site returns to the others and tells them where her favored site is by doing the “figure eight” dance on the surface of the cluster of bees.

Intelligently designed

Try to imagine this system evolving. Suppose that one day an enterprising bee manages to invent the dance. What if the sun goes down before the other bees understand? Even more important, if this process evolved gradually over a long time, how would all the bee ancestors have survived while this system of communication was evolving?

Among the wonders of God's creation, the honeybee provides startling evidence of intelligent design and purpose. The precisely coordinated language used for the bee's survival has too many vital and independent parts for such a system to have evolved.

We are forced by logic and common sense to conclude that the whole process was implanted in bees at the time of their creation. Like the bees, the dance did not, and could not, evolve.

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