Communication behavior exists not only between humans, but also between animals in their own unique ways of communicating. Bees are the animals we know and have the most complex social life, using smelling, tactile, auditory and visual receptors to receive information and communicate. There are three main ways of communication of bees: chemical communication, sound communication and dance communication.
Bees collect nectar
Chemical Communication:
Bees' olfactory receptors are very sensitive, which allows them to distinguish at least the smell of flowers in the 700 and many artificial odors. Oleic acid is a kind of rotten smell emitted by dead bees, worker bees will quickly drag dead bees away from the hive after smelling this kind of smell, and the dead bees will not be immediately dragged away by the worker bees until they emit the smell of oleic acid, which shows that odor communication is very important in the life of bees.
Worker bees carry corpses based on the smell of oleic acid
Each colony has its own unique odor, which is also the basis for defending the bee to check whether each returning nectar-eating bee allows it to pass, and the odor substances emitted by members of the same species for communication are called pheromones. Queen bees can emit a variety of odors, at least two of which are pheromones. Decanoic acid is a well-known bee pheromone, which is produced by the secretion of the large jaw gland of the queen bee, and this pheromone has many different effects: first of all, it can inhibit the development of the ovaries of the worker bees (the worker bees are all female bees) and prevent the worker bees from laying eggs; second, it can attract the worker bees to feed and care for the queen bees; again, it can inhibit the production of the queen bees, and finally it can attract male peaks to mate during the marriage flight.
The queen bee feeds and cares for the worker bees by secreting decanoic acid
2. Sound communication
Bees are able to make sounds by rubbing their wing muscles, and if their wings are folded, they make a humming sound, which is different from the sound they make when they fly. If a new queen bee appears in a hive, then the colony is imminent. The sound communication of bees before the swarm is the most familiar and typical. In general, the colony begins to divide shortly after the new bee begins to pupate, and when the new queen develops to an age when it can make a sound response, its response will be perceived by the entire colony. This response consists of about 10 short pulse tones, meaning to tell other bees that the new queen must be forcibly left in the nest chamber. At this time, the worker bee is strongly swinging its abdomen up and down on the nest chamber, which helps to prevent the old queen from leaving the nest for a while and inhibit the old bee from laying eggs.
Sound communication between the old queen and the new queen makes the bee division happen at the most appropriate time
3. Dance communication
The dance of the bees is a unique and surprising means of behavior and communication in the animal kingdom. The 1973 Nobel Laureate animal behaviorist Karl von Frisch studied bee dance for 20 years and concluded that the dance movements of bees contain symbolic information about the distance and orientation of honey sources, and other recruited worker bees used this information to find newly discovered pollen and nectar sources.
Dance communication of bees
Different species of bees have different "dance languages", with bees in Austria dancing the "8" and Italian bees dancing round and sickle dances. If the honey source found by the scout bee (taking the Australian bee as an example) is within 60m of the hive, then it will dance a circle dance, and if the honey source it finds is 60m away, the scouting bee will return to the hive and will dance a tail dance, also known as the 8-character dance.
The dance of the bees can not only convey the distance information between the hive and the honey source, but also the orientation information, how to transmit it? It turns out that when the scout bee flies to find the honey source, it will write down the relative position between the honey source, the sun and the hive (in a straight line or form an angle), and then fly back to the hive to dance the 8-character dance. When dancing the 8-character dance, first take a short straight line, walk through the tail swing once, then go around half a circle to the left, return to the origin and repeat the straight line once, and then go around half a circle to the right, thus completing a dance cycle. When the scout bee dances in a straight line, it will express the orientation information of the honey source. If you go in a straight line vertically upwards, it means that the honey source is in the direction of the sun, if you go straight down vertically, it means that the honey source is in the opposite direction of the sun, and if the honey source deviates from the hive and the sun line by 80 degrees to the left, the 8-character dance will also deviate from the vertical line 80 ° to the left when walking in a straight line. With unknown changes in the sun throughout the day. The bees' dances also change, but no matter what, most of the time they can still find the source of the honey without error.
Bees dance to express the location of the honey source
From this, we can see that the small bee group also contains many intelligent communication methods and means, which is not only of great significance for their information exchange and division of labor, but also an important way to make the population reproduce for generations.