Study Shows Bees Can Follow Directions
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
British researchers have shown that honeybees are able to read the directional signals conveyed by foragers in the famous figure-eight “waggle dance.”
Zoologist Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for showing that the dance contained directions to food sources.
Researchers at Rothamsted Research in Britain exposed bees to a forager’s dance, then moved them to a different location before releasing them. They reported in this week’s issue of Nature that all the bees had the same flight path, but the relocated ones did not end up at the food source because of their different starting point.
