In honor of World Bee Day on May 20, here are six surprising things you might not know about nature's hardest-working pollinators.
1. Bees like to 'waggle dance'
Bees can communicate and make decisions by dancing.
When a honeybee scouts out and inspects a new nest it uses a waggle dance to advertise and debate its merits. The better the site, the longer and harder the bee dances. If another bee bumps into a dancing bee, she will go off to inspect the site and if she likes it, she, too, will waggle.
Eventually, the dynamics of the waggle dancing causes about 20 to 30 bees to agree on the best nest site, and they communicate their decision to the rest of the swarm by making high-pitched sounds and by buzzing their wings among the other bees.
Photo by Martin Schutt/picture alliance via Getty Images
The Massachusetts woman arrived in an SUV towing a trailer carrying bee hives and started "shaking" them, breaking the cover off one, the report says.
A vaccine for bees may evoke images of teeny hypodermic needles, but this product works in a sophisticated way that reflects the social structure of honeybee colonies.
A vaccine for bees may evoke images of teeny hypodermic needles, but this product works in a sophisticated way that reflects the social structure of honeybee colonies.
