How do bees chat to one another? By shaking their funky butts, of course! This video was made by Andy Quitmeyer, a digital media Master's student, for Georgia Tech's MARS lab, in a project funded by the US National Science Foundation.
Bees were one of my favourite subjects when I was studying for my biology degree, who couldn't fall in love with these adorable little chaps*?
*actually, all the bees you see here are female. The males don't work, they just gorge themselves on honey, mate, and die. If you think that sounds fun, bear in mind that they die because the penis is torn off during mating.
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... Well, the drones may also die because they failed to mate and are thrown out of the hive in the autumn to die of exposure and starvation. Yay for beehives!
This information is so old, i think the '70s. Stated in Richard`s Dawkins book.
Did a wikisearch and here I was right
The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-19-286092-5.
@2 bogdan_rou
As the video states, the waggle dance was first decoded by Karl von Frisch, for which he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize. He didn't make a YouTube video of it though.