Section 4
A paper published in Nature on May 12th provides new data that resolves a long-standing scientific controversy. In the 1960s, Nobel Prize winning zoologist, Karl von Frisch, proposed that honeybees use dance as a coded message to guide other bees to new food sources. However, some scientists did not accept von Frischs theory. Using harmonic radar, scientists, funded in part by the UKs Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now tracked the flight of bees that had attended a waggle dance and found that they flew straight to the vicinity of the feeding site, as predicted by von Frisch. The tracks allowed the scientists to determine how accurately bees translate the dance code into successful navigation, and showed that they correct for wind drift even when en route to destinations they have never visited before.
If a honeybee worker discovers a good feeding site it is believed that she informs her nest mates through a dance that describes the distance and direction of the feeding site. This dance language was first described by Karl von Frisch in the 1960s but his experiments also showed that bees that had attended the dance took far longer to get to food than would be expected. This time delay caused other scientists to argue that the recruits did not read the abstract code in the dance at all, but found the food source simply by tracking down the smell that they had picked up from the dancing bee. Another suggestion was that recruits simply followed the dancer when she flew back to the food, and then other bees joined in. The controversy has persisted because prior to the advent of harmonic radar, no one could show exactly where the recruits flew when they left their hives.
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