Fun Fact of the Day 6/4

I'm going to bed soon, so I'll keep today's tidbit brief, but nonetheless fun. How about insects? I just bought a used copy of E.O. Wilson's "The Insect Societies" today, so I have bugs on the mind anyway. My personal favorite aspect of so many insects, as implied by the aforementioned title, is their intriguing-nay-fascinating social structures. You see, the subtitle of that book I bought was "The Super Organism", and not as a 50's era sci-fi reference either, because many insects have social structures so amazingly cohesive that they tend to evolve almost as a whole organism rather than a collection of individuals. Ants and Bees are the two most intriguing examples of this, and tonight I wish to highlight one particularly delightful tidbit about the latter gregarious insect, bees. Specifically, it has to do with a behavior colloquially known as the "waggle dance". The waggle dance is a behavior demonstrated by honeybees after foraging, and is used to communicate to other bees in the hive the location and direction of a resource such as food or water. In it, a bee will return to the hive after having located a specific resource, say, a potentially useful clump of pollen-rich flowers. In order to inform it's comrades of the way to reach this clump of flowers, the bee performs a rapid and very intricate series of movements which replicate those needed to reach the food, and also reflect the turns needed and angle of light along the flight path. The result of this quick dance is the ability of the rest of the bees to thus locate the resource from their waggled directions. Amazing, no? A more detailed description can be found in this video.