Anthony P. Solli
You know how important time is to us and how much attention we pay to hours, days, seasons, rhythms and cycles. Well, scientistsare finding that life is a marvelously complex pattern of rhythms and time cycles, in tune with a world made up of the rhythmic movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets and the precision of vibrating atoms. In fact, scientists are concluding that probably all forms of life have builtin clocks of one kind or another.
Lets look at the bee (Apoldea). Bees are blessed with a very reliable twentyfourhour clock that is seldom affected by anything and does not seem to depend on events in the outside world to keep it working.
Bees also can measure very short units of time, down to mere fractions of a second. They use their internal clock sense to arrive at the right time for the opening of a flower that offered a generous serving of nectar the day before.
The biological clock is also a very important part of a bee’s directionfinding equipment. When a foraging bee leaves the hive to look for nectar or pollen, an almost unbelievable process begins. Flying at a speed of perhaps thirteen miles an hour, the bee’s eyes sense its flight speed in relation to the ground and somehow measure the direction of its flight compared to the angle of the sun.
On a heavily overcast day bees seem confused, presumably because there has been no glimpse of the position of the sun. But on a partly cloudy day, a bee can use a small patch of blue sky as its directionfinder. This is possible because bee’s eyes detect polarized light. Bees also see the entire pattern of the sky at once, for their compound eyes are made up of thousands of tiny facets.
It is interesting to note that flowers look quite different to bees from the way they look to us. This is because bees see ultraviolet as a distinct color in itself.
When it comes home to the hive, the bee does its intricate little showandtell dance accompanied by a whirring sound made by beating its wings.
This tailwagging dance done by a foraging bee involves a number of precise measurements and is rather complicated. The dance, performed on a wall of the hive, traces a sort of imaginary mathematical diagram of the direction and distance to a supply of nectar or pollen. The bees who watch the dance also examine the body of the dancer with their antennae to find out what kind of flowers have been visited. The scent of the blossoms clings to the forager’s hairy coat. The quality of the food is tested by tasting the sample while the reporter bee tells its opinion of food through the energy and persistence of its dancing.
Additional information is given by the dancing bee through the whirring sounds it makes. The length of the sounds indicates the relative distance from the hive to the food supply. It is believed that the bee audience “hears” the sounds through his legs. Bees are very sensitive to slight vibrations in any material they are standing on, although they are otherwise deaf to most sounds.
The antennae of honeybees serve as their thermometers. From them, the bees receive signals telling them what needs to be done to keep the hive comfortable and safe. If the bee colony is too warm, some of the bees form living chains and fan the air with their wings. Other bees collect water, which will cool the nest as it evaporates from the surfaces of the honeycomb. At the same time, a watery substance, probably from their honey stomachs, evaporates from their mouths. When it gets too cold outside, the bees warm the nest by clustering very closely together.