杏吧原创

BEES tell each other where food is by performing a dance in the honeycomb.
Now, with the help of lasers and strobe lights, scientists have discovered how
bopping bees lure their audiences to the dance floor.

A honeybee back from a foraging mission uses a coded dance, including a
side-to-side 鈥渨aggle鈥�, to inform its nest mates about the whereabouts of the
food. Soon other bees arrive and copy its moves before flying off to find the
booty. 鈥淏ut the complex interaction between honeybee dancers and their followers
is far from being understood,鈥� says J眉rgen Tautz of W眉rzburg
University in Germany.

One of the key puzzles is how a dancing bee attracts its audience. Bees often
arrive from cells elsewhere in the honeycomb where they couldn鈥檛 possibly see
the dancer, and probably couldn鈥檛 feel the low-frequency vibrations of the
waggle dance over the higher pitched buzz of the hive.

Perhaps the answer lies in the structure of the waxy comb itself? The comb is
slightly elastic, so it won鈥檛 vibrate like a rigid solid. Instead, a vibration
radiating from a waggling bee may make the cell walls swing progressively more
out of time with each other.

Eventually, there would be what is known as a phase reversal鈥攐ne wall
of a certain cell starts to vibrate in the opposite direction to the other wall.
Any bee in the vicinity would feel its feet on either side of its body wiggling
in opposite directions鈥攁 signal it might not be able to ignore.

To test the idea, Tautz鈥檚 team simulated the low-frequency vibrations of a
waggle dance in a cell of an empty bee hive, and measured the response in other
cells with a laser. Sure enough, they found phase reversals in a complex pattern
of single cells up to 7 cell widths away.

With strobe lights and video cameras, the team also recorded more than 132
dancing bees recruiting 471 followers in an active hive. As Tautz predicted,
most of the followers came from a region of the hive where the cell walls were
vibrated out of synch with each other.