Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part I

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A bee really does this little dance — called a waggle dance because it waggles its little butt — to tell other bees where it’s found food.  An Austrian named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for figuring this out.

To distract you from making a judgment about whether AG is a dick or not — maybe he’s just going through a phase — here’s a nice video by Andrew Quitmeyer and Tucker Balch, showing how the bees talk to each other via dance.  And here’s a charming NPR show by Robert Krulwich on bee decision-making processes which make the human processes look outright lame.

http://abstrusegoose.com/186

7 thoughts on “Abstruse Goose: Bees – Part I

    1. I thought of you — not the bees, the attitude. In the nicest possible way.

  1. Bees when getting directions, in order to maximize the amount of nectar they can carry back to the hive, only take the minimum amount of fuel necessary to fly themselves to the location. So if there isn’t anything else around the bees can fill up on…. they could starve with this plan. So AG is a big dick lol.

    But most places have plenty of other flowers around that would let them get back to the hive, even if they can’t bring home extra.

  2. All workers are female. “He” wouldn’t tell “his” friends anything. [b]She[/b] would tell [b]her[/b] friends. This is just another example of the notion of male as the default person. Women are women, but men are people.

  3. Jemand, I’ve been worrying about that. The experiment made those angles to the sun so clear and simple but what about a field of flowers?
    Jonathan, I sort of knew that about bees. I wonder if AG does. We should bring him the glad tidings.

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