The Honey Bus - Meredith May Page 0,93

single bee shook vigorously side to side, like it was being zapped with electricity. Its wings beat so fast they disappeared from view, and its body blurred to a black smudge. Then it suddenly stopped, as if catching its breath, took a few steps, then vibrated again. A group of bees had gathered to watch. I held the frame out to Grandpa and pointed.

“What’s wrong with that one?”

“Nothing. There’s your dancing bee.”

Grandpa knelt down for a better look, and interpreted the dance for me.

“It’s a field bee, and she found a really good food source, and she’s telling the other bees how to find it,” he said.

I watched the dancer walk in a straight line, making a sound I’d never heard from a bee before, a low rumble of a revving race car. She waggled her abdomen, then abruptly stopped, made a sharp right and circled back to her starting point, forming the capital letter D. Then she repeated her dance again. And again. Sometimes she turned left and made the D backward, but she always came back to the same starting place. Some of the bees cleared the floor for her, while others tripped behind her, trying to follow. She seemed possessed.

It wasn’t how I’d pictured bee dancing. I thought bees danced together in a group, and more gracefully, maybe bopping up and down or swaying. This bee wheeled about the honeycomb in the grip of what appeared to be a full-blown tremor or crippling panic attack.

“What’s she saying?”

Grandpa kept a small library of bee books, dating back to the 1800s, and had read the work of Karl von Frisch, a zoology professor who won the Nobel Prize for first deciphering bee dancing in Germany in 1944. Grandpa knew the dance steps were intentional, and conveyed three things—the direction, distance and quality of nectar and pollen. The angle of her wiggle walk, in relation to an imaginary straight line toward the top of the hive, was like an arrow pointing in the direction the bees should fly relative to the sun. How long she danced conveyed flight time from the hive, and the enthusiasm of her performance signaled the quality of the food. A passionate dance meant a really good discovery, maybe a swath of untapped sage coming into bloom.

Other field foragers take the directions and fly off to verify the dancer’s information. If they like what they find, they will return to the hive and dance, too, passing the good news along to their hive mates.

As Grandpa was telling me all this, more bees had gathered for the performance, and soon the dancing bee had a small crowd. When she finally stopped shaking, her audience moved toward her to touch her.

“She sends a vibration while she dances, and the other bees hear it with their feet and know where to go,” Grandpa said.

One by one, bees lifted into the air and headed west, deeper into the canyon to go find the treasure. I snapped my head up to meet Grandpa’s eyes. He was grinning. I laughed out loud, pleased with this new wordless language he was teaching me.

I handed the frame back to him, and he slid it back into the hive.

“Can you guess what other type of bee dances?” he asked.

Right away I crossed off the lazy drones. Also the queen, who was too busy laying eggs to dance. Nurse bees don’t leave the nursery to see what’s outside, so they were unlikely candidates.

“Give up?”

I nodded.

“Scout bees.”

I remembered Grandpa had explained to me that the scouts were the house hunters. When a growing colony is getting ready to divide, he said, they are the bees that select a new home and lead the swarm to it.

“Scouts dance to tell the bees where to relocate,” he said.

Every spring, Grandpa put in overtime as a swarm catcher, so he knew a lot about them. When bee colonies outgrow their nesting space, they naturally divide themselves, with part of the colony flying off with the queen to rebuild a new colony somewhere else, and the rest staying behind to rear a new queen.

While a bee swarm looks like a disorganized frenzy in the air, Grandpa explained the event is actually planned in advance, with the bees discussing possible routes and withholding food from their queen to thin her for flight. The group must pick a warm day to depart and gorge themselves on honey first, so they won’t die out in the cold while they are in between homes.

Initially, a