Specimen Showcase | Social Dances🎶🎵
- Hong Kong Biodiversity Museum
- Mar 10
- 3 min read
You may think that dancing is an activity reserved to humans, but if you read our posts for long enough, you already suspect that we will show you that other animals also engage in the dance😏.
The Asian honey bee🐝, 𝘈𝘱𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘢 Fabricius, 1793, is a social insect species in which adult workers work 💼for the growth and survival of the colony. This species has a wide distribution from southern Russia to most of southeastern Asia, including Hong Kong 🇭🇰. Historically, there are 7 to 11 recognized 𝘈𝘱𝘪𝘴 honey bee species worldwide and all but one are native from Asia. Indeed, the sister species 👭of 𝘈. 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘢, the European honey bee, 𝘈𝘱𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘢, which is commonly kept to produce honey 🍯, is introduced in Asia and Hong Kong. It is possible to differentiate them by the striping 🟡⚫️on their abdomen. Besides being slightly smaller in size A. cerana, possesses an even number of black bands across the entire abdomen, whereas A. mellifera possesses an uneven number of black bands, with thinner stripes on the front of the abdomen and thicker ones on the bottom part, giving it a more yellow appearance at the front but darker at the back.
Colonies of honey bees are composed of a queen 👑 and 20 000 to 80 000 workers. A few males, called drones, also occur for a limited period of time, but their role is limited to reproduction. Thus, in nature, you will most likely observe the workers. They have many roles to play such as building the nest structure and taking care of the brood, but also, and this is what interests us today, gathering food from nectar and pollen to support the rest of the society and the growth of larvae. After discovering a nice patch of flowers 🌸which can provide food for the colony, a worker will have to go back to the beehive and communicate with its sisters (yes, all bee workers within a colony are sisters and thus females) about its exact location; meaning informing about the direction and distance.
But how to convey such information? The bees do not speak but instead will dance, or rather waggle dance 💃🏻. The waggle dance represents a sophisticated communication system 🗣 in honey bees in which the direction and proximity of the flower will be passed along to nearby workers within the nest. The bee will produce a series of 8-shaped dances during which she will buzz her body more frenetically at a given time. At that point, the bee uses its body to specify the angle that the flower makes with the relative position of the sun☀️, indicating which direction to go. To indicate distance, the bee will shorten or extend this buzzing period 🕑 with shorter waggles for closer distances from the hive, and longer ones for larger distances. Once the audience gets the message💡, they are ready to set off and travel to the flowers. And it is usually quite a lengthy journey as most trips will be at least 500 to 900 m long, and sometimes as long as 2500 m! Reported to human size, this would equal to a journey of 425 km; or 950 km round trip just to get food! Food delivery companies should rather be called after bees than big mammals sitting on their butt all day…
And on the way back, honey bees have to carry quite a load of food, either nectar or pollen, but never both at the same time. For pollen, honey bees have a secret trick on their legs🦵🏻. Their hind tibia, the central part of their legs, possess a series of long concave spiky hairs that form a pollen basket🧺 called the corbicula. The pollen will thus be stored during transport into this pollen basket; and to maximize efficiency, the bee will groom itself and moisturize the pollen collected from its body to pack it into the basket. When their baskets are filled, you can see swollen yellow balls on their hind legs. How cute! 💛 This structure (the corbicula) is shared with other honey bee species, bumble bees, orchid bees (google it if you have never seen one) and stingless bees which is why they are all called corbiculate bees.
And just like we have different kinds of dance👯, like Jazz, pop dance, ballet, etc; different species of honeybees also have different dialects of the dance! Isn’t it amazing✨?
Text: Phoebe Leung
Comments