Waggle

Do you know what is a Waggle?

It is actually Waggle dance by the way!

Ok now! Of course it is a dance but it is also a means of communication! And no! You cannot perform it! If you need to communicate, please speak!

Now coming to the dance!

In the Book by Richard Dawkins called the selfish gene he notes how the mental abilities of bees are much more developed than those of other insects. In addition to having more complex motor skills, bees have a truly extraordinary form of intelligence. The way they use to communicate with the rest of the colony is a symbolic language, a sort of dance to eight with which they signal to their companions the routes to follow and the presence of flowers full of pollen.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.

The waggle dance and the round dance are two forms of dance behaviour that are part of a continuous transition. As the distance between the resource and the hive increases, the round dance transforms into variations of a transitional dance, which, when communicating resources at even greater distances, becomes the waggle dance.

In the case of Apis mellifera ligustica, the round dance is performed until the resource is about 10 metres away from the hive, transitional dances are performed when the resource is at a distance of 20 to 30 metres away from the hive, and finally, when it is located at distances greater than 40 metres from the hive, the waggle dance is performed.

Apparently, even close to the nest, the round dance can contain elements of the waggle dance, such as a waggle portion. It has therefore been suggested that the term waggle dance is better for describing both the waggle dance and the round dance.

Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance!

The code has been broken thus and this is what it means!

Figure-eight-shaped waggle dance of the honeybee (Apis mellifera). A waggle run oriented 45° to the right of ‘up’ on the vertical comb indicates a food source 45° to the right of the direction of the sun outside the hive.

A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase.

The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the resource being advertised by the dancing bee.

For cavity-nesting honey bees, like the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) or Apis nigrocincta, flowers that are located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs!

The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase. The more excited the bee is about the location, the more rapidly it will waggle, so it will grab the attention of the observing bees, and try to convince them. If multiple bees are doing the waggle dance, it’s a competition to convince the observing bees to follow their lead, and competing bees may even disrupt other bees’ dances or fight each other off!

Well, the crying child gets the milk and the vigorously waggling bee gets the attention! And sometimes you need to make a big Bang to make sure that your warning is taken seriously!

The dance is an elaborate dance done by the bees which lead to a Nobel prize! Not for the Bee of course since, well it was too heavy to carry (the Nobel that is!!). Then again they do carry the weight of the pollination world in their tender wings so they may not get a Nobel but they are really Noble!
Another definitely Noble and legendary people are our soldiers!

They selflessly dedicate their life for the country! One such Noble soul was Lance Naik Dinesh Singh  who was a brave and committed soldier, who laid down his life at the age of 25 years in the line of his duty. You will not be forgotten…

Jai Hind…