Douglas Farm

Wolfgang H. Kirchner and William F. Towne two honey bee biologist. Have done some amazing work:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/244/4905/686

Hearing in Honey Bees: Detection of Air-Particle Oscillations

WILLIAM F. TOWNE 1 and WOLFGANG H. KIRCHNER 2

Science 12 May 1989:

Vol. 244. no. 4905, pp. 686 - 688

DOI: 10.1126/science.244.4905.686

1 Department of Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, and Department of Biology, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA 19530.

2 Zoologisches Institut der Universitat Würzburg, Würzburg, FRG.

Although the airborne sounds produced by dancing honey bees seem essential in the bees' dance communication, attempts to show directly that bees can detect airborne sounds have been unsuccessful. It is shown here that bees can in fact detect airborne sounds and that they do so by detecting air-particle movements. Most vertebrates, by contrast, detect pressure oscillations. Because all traveling sound waves have both components, either can be used in sound detection. The bees' acoustic sense appears to be sensitive enough to allow bees to detect the air-particle movements that occur within several millimeters of a sound-emitting dancer.

Submitted on November 29, 1988

Accepted on March 27, 1989

Mechanisms of food provisioning of honeybee larvae by worker bees

Christina Heimken, Pia Aumeier and Wolfgang H. Kirchner*

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Fakultät für Biologie und Biotechnologie, Bochum, Germany

First published online March 12, 2009

Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 1032-1035 (2009)

Published by The Company of Biologists 2009

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/212/7/1032

Although it has clearly been demonstrated in previous studies that honeybees inspect their worker brood in a non-random fashion, it is still unclear which signals and cues worker bees use to monitor the nutritional state of their brood. Here we show that worker bees can recognize and quantify the larval food present in a brood cell olfactorily and identify potential mechanical signals produced by the brood. There is no evidence for additional chemical hunger signals produced by the larvae. However, the pattern of movement of larvae within their cells changes with their nutritional state and might provide additional information to nurse bees.

The Sensory Basis

of the Honeybee's Dance Language

By by Wolfgang H. Kirchner and William F. Towne

http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/bee_dance_2.htm

For many centuries, naturalists have observed that honeybees tell their nestmates about discoveries they make beyond the hive. Nevertheless, the system of communication that the insects use remained a mystery until the 1940s, when Karl von Frisch of the University of Munich in Germany first discovered the significance of bees' dances. In the hive the steps and waggles of a successful forager correlate closely with the exact distance and direction from the nest to the resource she has discovered. For the next two decades, most scientists believed bees relied primarily on these silent movements to communicate.

In the 1960s this view was challenged in two ways. The first challengers were Adrian M. Wenner, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Harald E. Esch of the University of Munich, now at Notre Dame University. Working independently, the two researchers discovered that the dances were not silent after all. As the bees dance, they emit faint low-frequency sounds, and Wenner and Esch both suggested that the sounds might play a critical role in the bees' communication. The use of sounds, they reasoned, might account for the bees' ability to communicate effectively in the complete darkness that prevails inside their nests. At the time, however, many scientists believed bees were deaf, and so the issue remained open.

FREQUENCY RANGE of the sounds a bee can detect extends well below the range heard by human ears. The graph shows how fast the air particles near a dancer's wings must travel to generate audible signals. Within this range, the bees show an ability to differentiate between sounds having varying frequencies.

THE DANCING ROBOT successfully recruited its nestmates to food away from the hive. The experimenters placed eight baits around the hive and programmed the robot to dance concerning one site. Observers in the field recorded the approach of searching bees. Most of the robot's recruits went to the bait indicated by its dance.

Wenner later raised the second challenge to von Frisch's description of the dance language, rethinking his first hypothesis at the same time. Bees, he argued, use none of the information in the dances or the sounds. Instead he proposed that the insects rely on odors to find the new resource advertised by the dancer.

Now both of these debates have been resolved. Bees, it turns out, can hear, and their ears are well suited for detecting the sounds associated with the dances. Observation of how the insects respond to a robot that dances and sings like a live forager shows that both sound and dance are needed to communicate information about the location of food. Silent dances, the experiment demonstrates, communicate nothing, and sound without dance also fails. Odors too are involved but appear to lack the importance that Wenner ascribes to them. Beyond the resolution of these issues, we have also recently learned much more about the nature of the dance sounds, the bees' sense of hearing and the aspects of the dance that are most essential in the communication.

Read the full article:

http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/bee_dance_2.htm