Sometimes the bee dance may be defective, or the bees may not be able to find their way to the nectar due to high wind or other unfavorable conditions.
The ‘bee dance’ lets bees communicate by encoding pieces of information, such as where to specifically find food in terms of distance and direction.
Thus, although the dance of the honeybee contains locational information about food sources, it is not necessary to assume that bee dances convey this information to other bees.
They do a bee dance to let the rest of the hive know they've discovered a source of nectar.
Similarly, we can look at the bee dances and describe them in intentional terms; the motions the bees engage in enable the other bees to go where the pollen is, but it does not seem plausible to attribute a conscious awareness of what information is being sent in the course of the bee dance.
Definition of bee dance in US English:
bee dance
noun
A series of movements performed in the hive by worker honeybees to inform the colony of the direction and distance to a food source.
Example sentencesExamples
They do a bee dance to let the rest of the hive know they've discovered a source of nectar.
Sometimes the bee dance may be defective, or the bees may not be able to find their way to the nectar due to high wind or other unfavorable conditions.
The ‘bee dance’ lets bees communicate by encoding pieces of information, such as where to specifically find food in terms of distance and direction.
Similarly, we can look at the bee dances and describe them in intentional terms; the motions the bees engage in enable the other bees to go where the pollen is, but it does not seem plausible to attribute a conscious awareness of what information is being sent in the course of the bee dance.
Thus, although the dance of the honeybee contains locational information about food sources, it is not necessary to assume that bee dances convey this information to other bees.