Explained: How bees communicate via dance techniques and navigate a particular route

New Delhi: Apart from acknowledging the tiny little bees for maintaining a balance in our ecosystem, several latest findings about the communication skills of these wonder organisms, and the ability to navigate the route back to their hive are sure to leave you astonished.

Not just are these tiny beings experts in communicating with their peers via an amazing dance technique, but they even take mental notes of landscapes around them to find their ways easily.

Here is a concise description of several advanced communication and navigation techniques used in the world of bees.

Waggle Dance

When a bee finds a place that could be a potential spot for regular food consumption for the other bees, it returns to the hive and informs about the location to its peers through waggle dance. In such a case, a bee would move along the hive wall in a particular direction, and waggle its butt.

The direction of hive wall suggest the direction of potential food, while the intensity of the waggle tells about the distance.

Studies suggests that bees mind map a particular location and explains it to the others based on the direction of the sun.

Navigation and Bees

Apart from noting the direction and movements of sun, bees also make a mental map of places that surrounds their hive, much like humans. This mental map helps the bees to navigate back to thier hive when there’s no sun or when they’ve lost the account of time.

These small creatures also save images of landmarks of the routes that they travel in thier tiny brains while exploring new places.

To understand how bees navigate, scientists collected several bees and kept them in dark to create a time shift while also inducing sleep for a while. Even without a proper sense of time, the bees were able to find their hive based on the virtual account of landmarks saved in their memory.