Had fun talking to Danny Wallace on 6 Music today (he’s filling in for George Lamb this week - listen here, 42 minutes in). Sadly, didn’t get time to talk about bees, which is my favourite story of the week. Apparently, the “waggledance” that bees do is largely useless.
As Caroline Williams says in New Scientist this week, the bee's waggle dance has become an established scientific fact: “even schoolchildren are taught that honeybees dance to tell hive-mates about good food sources.”
But it might not be true. Researchers have stopped questioning whether that's really what's going on, and focussed in on trying to interpret the dance. But it turns out that, if they are communicating, no one's listening. Among bees that attend to a dance, 93 per cent ignore the instructions and head to a food source they already know about. Others are apparently unable to follow the instructions. Others watch the dance more than 50 times and make several sorties out of the hive but never find the food.
So, what’s gone wrong? At what point did it become “fact” that the waggledance sends bees off to find food? As well as fascinating science, there’s a fascinating story here about the way science works. Anyone know something about how a suggestion became received wisdom then made it into the textbooks? And what other scientific truths are nothing of the sort?
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