Von frisch bee study

• Aim

  to investigate how bees communicate the location of a food source to each other
• Method

  put food sources close to the hive and further away from the hive

  when bees reached the solution they were marked by spots of different paint

  observed their behaviour when they returned to the hive
• Results

  Round dance = food less than 100m away. moved around in a circle

  Waggle dance = food more than 100m away. moved in a figure of 8 and waggled on the straight part. slower the dance = further away

  60% of bees then went to find the food sources
• Conclusion

  bees use a variety of different movements to communicate to each other the distance and direction of food sources
• strength

  -high reliability

  used wooden hives instead of glass hives and got similar results

  -initiated animal communication research

  his research was some of the earliest into animal communication and encouraged others to investigate
• weakness

  -only focused on dance and movement

  importance of sound in bee communication was overlooked