Over the years, I've grown to find that these amazing little creatures actually are quite intelligent, but it wasn't until recently that I found out just how smart they are. So smart, in fact, that they helped a German biologist win a Nobel Prize. No, I don't mean by his observations of their behavior, I mean by their complex navigation and communication skills that he and others documented. I'll let you be the judge of just how smart they really are, and the test to find out is simple... could you do what they do? Let's find out.
The colony locates likely food sources by sending out scout bees to make observations and report back to the hive. That's right, report back. Then their job is done. It's up to the workers to actually go out, following the directions of the scouts, and find the food. The scouts stay behind in the hive, so they must have been able to communicate the precise coordinates of where the food is... otherwise, how would the workers know how far and what direction to go?
This behavior fascinated a German biologist named Karl von Frisch, and he began a live long study of their behaviors. His observations, not complex calculations, resulted in his winning the Nobel Prize in 1973 for Medicine and Physiology. What Frisch found has been studied by researchers in communication theory, robotics, the military and many other areas.
When the scout bees return to the hive, they do a dance. This dance gives the workers all of the information needed to find food anywhere within their flight range. No matter if it's cloudy, windy, or a clear day, their information is accurate in every instance, except when researchers deliberately try to fool the bees. Then the research shows that the bees make the exact errors in calculations that the researchers intended to be made.
In the dance of the scout bees, there are messages that pass on critical information. If they dance in a circular pattern on the walls of the hive, the food is within 50 - 75 meters of the hive. If they dance in a "waggle" pattern, the distance is further than 75 meters. The straight portion of the dance corresponds to the angle of the sun at the time the observations were made, and the speed of the dance conveys distance. I spoke with a friend of mine who is a navigator with the Air National Guard, and was told that these two values, the angle of the sun and the distance, are all that's needed to locate a target for a bomber in the Air Force. This is the work that the navigator does. In other words, bees navigate using exactly the same process that the Air Force uses. And you've got to be an officer to be a navigator.
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