Hello to everyone! As we wind up our twelfth term am happy to say that it was one of a kind experience. In the last but not least article I would love to share with you one of the things I have found to be fascinating. Today I would love to share one of the honey bee wonders-how they communicate. As we all know communication is the process of transmitting information from one person to another, that?s in a very simple definition. Human beings do communicate by talking, writing or giving signals/gestures. Some other animals do communicate by giving sounds or signals, though not in the same perfection as human beings. Amazingly one of the living things that communicate accurately and with perfection are honeybees, they communicate in a peculiar way that surprises many scientists. Bees are social animals because they have effective communication in which it is a basic requirement for social interaction.

COMMUNICATION FROM QUEEN TO THE BEE COLONY

Because bees live in a relative dark environment this suggest that odor, touch, sound is their stimuli, rather than vision. The queen bee is the leader of the whole colony, it manages to communicate with the rest of the colony with the use of special chemical released from its body in form of an odor that is received and integrated into the nervous system of the receiving bees. The odor spreads to the entire colony, such massage of communication from the queen to the rest of the colony involve, giving information on migration to a good living place, dividing the colony if its too big, and alerts male bee drones that now she wants to be mated, when she flies out only drones will follow her in order to mate.

FOOD LOCATION

Communication associated with food location is essential to bees, some few bees go out the hive to the field to investigate where the good food source is, and bees love nectar and pollen. One the place is discovered they return to the hive and inform other workers on where to find the food source by dancing on the flat part of the comb giving the rest the following information Where food is,  The distance from the hive to the food source, Taste of the food and amount of food.

All this information is passed through two types of dances, these are the round dance mostly done for food less than approximately 100m and the wag tail dance showing the food that is located a distance of more than 100m, these dance is used to also show direction of the food and hide from enemies.

Lastly the antennae in bees is used for communication purpose, they touch each other with their antennae in order to get different information, this method is also used for identification, it?s easy to identify a bee from another colony through this method and also their generation as well as parenthood. In deed bees are well organized animals and their communication is fascinating. A part from the sweet honey and other potentials they posses they are also interesting to learn from.

Source

TANZANIA WILDLIFE RESEARCH INSTITUTE BEEKEEPING AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION NEWSLETTER.