Today I found out... Honey-Bees have an incredible grasp of time. They are able to time their flights with internal clocks. They can also work out how fast they are flying by measuring the speed at which objects pass by their eyes. They can combine these two things to work out how far from their hive a particular patch of flowers is. What's more they can communicate all this to their hive-mates...
When a scout bee finds a particularly good patch of flowers, she collects some pollen or nectar and buzzes back to her hive. Other bees cluster around while the bee performs a dance. If the flowers are nearby the bee just dances round in circles. But if they're more than 50 meters or so away, she performs a special waggle dance, running up and down the comb wagging her tail from side to side then start circling round and starting again. The angle of her run up the comb tells the other bees which direction to go in relation to the sun. The number of tail waggings she does tell them how long they need to fly for at a particular speed to reach the flowers considering wind speed too...
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