Just saw a post about bees and them having a democracy, and then someone mentions things like how communicate and the nuances to their communication.
How the eff does that work
In: Other
I mean. There are people who spend days upon days with differing hives and bees to study their interactions with each other and their reactions to different scenarios amongst many populations. They are able to gather evidence over the majority and make assumptions like any other subject. By using gases they’re able to temporarily calm the bees in order to plant cameras to observe their relationship with the queen.
biologists who study animal behavior often spend time literally just watching. they adjust one part of the environment of the animal they’re studying and watch to see how the animals respond and if there is a change in their behavior as a population.
in this case, bee communication was discovered by moving the food source of bees and closely watching them to see how they interacted with each other after visiting the new food location. the scientists found that different locations led to the bees doing different “dances” with/between each other. bees that had previously never even seen the food source were then able to travel directly to it, indicating that the hive had communicated the food location through that specific dance. this allowed the biologists to conclude that this “dancing” was the bees’ method of communication.
edit: clarified how the bee communication dances work
For bees specifically it probably helps that we’ve domesticated them for 10,000 years and when you support a bee hive they still do the majority of their natural behaviours, making them pretty easy to do long term studies.
Well bee keeping is an ancient art. Like 10,000 years old. Modern day scientists mark the bees with ink for social experiments and see if bees are accepted into other hives etc. Bees are kept in controlled enviroments with cameras and studies are done on their interactions etc. We look for patterns that can be replicated in their behavoir in their society. One pattern is scout bees find a nee nesting site. The come back to the hive and alert the hive of a potential new location. Some workers agree to move some dont. When the queen agree she leaves the hive to the new location and they rebuild. The old hive creates a new queen with the larva shes left. We notice a democracy when multiple scouts attempt to tell the hive of a new locations. Some are able to convince the hive and gather support some arent
Latest Answers