Sunday, December 1, 2024

Buzz buzz there is food over here

 Honeybees do not have ears, but they still communicate with each other. Honeybees communicate in two main ways; they use special chemical scents called pheromones and they also dance!

The queen honeybee gives off a pheromone, this causes all the honeybees in the beehive to smell the same. The pheromone from the queen honeybee helps the guard honeybees check that the honeybees that are coming into the beehive belong in that specific beehive. 

The honeybees also have a warning pheromone that the workers can produce. The warning pheromone tells the other honeybees that there is something dangerous around and then the honeybees will work together to get rid of the danger. 

Credit to Beetanical Apiary
Honeybees have a couple different dances that they use to tell the other honeybees many different things. The most famous of these dances is the waggle dance, this dance is used to communicate where there are food sources outside the beehive. When a honeybee comes back from collecting food, she will start moving in a figure eight and shaking her body back and forth. The direction of her shaking gives the other worker honeybees a map to the food source that she had just returned from.

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