Quantum Honeybees solves the mystery of the communication bee dance?

craziest part is that the bees calculate the sun’s movement!

From Quantim Honeybees, Discover

“Von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn’t been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb, which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a waggle dance, which in outline looks something like a coffee bean—two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.

It is easy to see why this beautiful and mysterious phenomenon captured Shipman’s young and mathematically inclined imagination. The bee’s finely tuned choreography is a virtuoso performance of biologic information processing. The central waggling part of the dance is the most important. To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down. One of Von Frisch’s most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer.

Direction alone is not enough, of course—the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food. The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes, Shipman explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle. The dancer will perform two alternating waggling runs symmetric about, but diverging from, the center line. The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs.

If that sounds almost straightforward, what happens next certainly doesn’t. Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the round dance. It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn. There are a number of variations between species.

Von Frisch’s work on the bee dance is impressive, but it is largely descriptive. He never explained why the bees use this peculiar vocabulary and not some other. Nor did he (or could he) explain how small- brained bees manage to encode so much information. The dance of the honeybee is special among animal communication systems, says Shipman. It conveys concise, quantitative information in an abstract, symbolic way. You have to wonder what makes the dance happen. Bees don’t have enough intelligence to know what they are doing. How do they know the dance in the first place? Calling it instinct or some other word just substitutes one mystery for another.”