Unfortunately, pollen and nectar can not gather itself. A bee's main role is to collect all pollen and nectar that it can get and take it to the hive. This process is known as foraging. Bees are not the only ones to forage. “The Secret Foraging Behavior of Bees” has done a study of many different species foraging, and they believe that animals follow a random pattern called Levy-like. An example of Levy behavior is when an animal doesn’t know where to get food, so they randomly search. Eventually, the animal will find food. After doing more research and studies, “The Secret Foraging Behavior of Bees” found out that bees don’t fully follow the Levy-like behavior. How they figured this out is that they experimented with fake flowers covered in pollen. They placed a spider on the flower, and the bees noticed and would stay clear from the flowers that had spiders on them. This concluded that bees were not randomly avoiding flowers but staying out of danger. What the scientists found out was that the foraging process was a little more complex than random. Thanks to the bees we now know that. But even if this experiment didn’t take place, we still would have figured out that their foraging pattern is not random. Nature tries to help bees forage for pollen and nectar which we would not have found out if not for an original Netflix documentary. Flowers help in the foraging process. You might be thinking, well duh, it’s the flowers’ pollen they are collecting. Which you are not wrong, but we know that all plants give off a certain electrical sound. Hive Alive demonstrates that flowers give off a specific sound wave that tells the bees whether or not it has pollen. For a bee that is vital because it would be a waste of a bee’s time if it had to check whether or not a flower had pollen. Since the flower lets the bees know that it is not ready for picking of pollen, the bees can fly by and not waste its time. Bees try to not waste the time of their colony members either because foragers use something called a waggle dance. Waggle dance is a form of communication for the bees. The information they share is where the best flowers are. Waggle dance is a specific process. First, the bee buzzes or waggles towards a direction. The direction the bee walks is the direction in which best quality of flowers are. Waggling tells the bees how far the flowers are. If the waggling is short then the flowers are close, the longer the bee waggles the farther the distance. Letting the bees know where the flowers are speeds up the process of the other foragers to collect pollen. A bees time to forage is precious which helps when they know where to go and which flowers not to waste time with.
2 Comments
Tessa Meiss
4/17/2018 11:27:15 am
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Sarah Georgieff
4/19/2018 11:13:48 am
I really enjoyed this blog because you make the topic of bees more interesting by focusing on their means of communication. I did not realize bees performed a waggle dance to notify other bees where the best flowers are. The picture of the bee also adds color to the page and follows the content of the blog nicely.
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AuthorHello, My name is Emma Meiss. I'm a senior at Dunlap High School. This second semester I will be writing about the importance of bees. ArchivesCategories |