Absolutely amazing! Makes me want to throw The Little Book of Bees out the window and go out and buy myself a big screen TV.
Thanks for the information WW, what great science by the Japanese bees!

These contributions to this AWAD compendium of bees are bland in comparison but they are in me, and must come out.

* The famous dance of the honeybees to tell co-workers the location of nectar fields is adjusted by the dancers to take into account almost infinitesimal daily shifts of the magnetic field of the Earth.

* Distances to food sources are communicated to hivemates by the speed of the dance. The faster the dance, the closer the food. The slower the dance the further the food. Some investigators believe that the distances to food sources are measured by the locating bee by self-counting the amount of energy expended by the bee in her direct flight home which is then translated into the speed of the dance - a neat little biological calculation.

* All honeybee languages are not the same. Though all dance, some races of honeybees speak in a "dialect" that is all but incomprehensible to other bees of their own species. The sophistication of information transfer is likely environmentally determined.

______________from The Little book of bees.