Honey bees cannot talk to each other, but they can communicate with each other using other communication signals. The waggle dance is a simple movement that the bees do on top of each other when they're in a swarm or inside a hive. It encapsulates everything another bee needs to know about where is a particular useful spot around the hive. They use pheromones for more local communication inside the hive. And one of them is basically molecules that are very volatile, so they diffuse very fast and they kind of decay very fast in time and space.
One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you've learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to power and influence in the 1400s, and even the spread of coronavirus in the lungs and the thing that brings all of these different topics together is complexity. This means that we can study one system to help us understand other systems — including bees.
In today's episode, Orit Peleg, Faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how bees self-organise and produce sophisticated behaviour. In this case, you'll hear how thousands of bees can work out where their queen is at any given point.
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This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.