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Meet the honeybee
A returning bee performs a waggle dance whose angle and length tell the hive the direction and distance to food.
🏡 Hives in hollow trees and hive boxes worldwide.🍽️ Nectar and pollen.⏳ Worker bees live about six weeks in summer; queens live several years.🛡️ Wild bees and other pollinators are declining because of habitat loss, pesticides and disease.
Friends and family
A hive is one giant family, with tens of thousands of sisters.
Every worker bee in a hive is a sister; the queen is their mother.
How they talk
The waggle dance, plus scents called pheromones.
How clever are they?
Bees grasp 'same' and 'different', and understand zero as a quantity.
What they feel
Shaken bees behave pessimistically in tests — one of the first signs of emotion-like states in insects.
Superpower: Waggle GPS
One dance can send thousands of bees to a flower patch kilometres away.
🤓 Did you know?
- Bees understand the concept of zero.
- A bee's waggle dance gives both direction and distance.
- Bees learned to roll balls for a reward by copying other bees.
Living alongside people
Bees pollinate a huge share of our fruit and vegetables. Honey is made by bees for bees, as their winter food.