Von+Frisch

=__**Decoding the Dance of the Bees !**__=

**Von Frisch**

 * Has run tests on bee's to determine whether or not they are color blind.
 * Turns out they are not. Through experiments he observed that the insect has the ability to distinguish colors apart from gray. He did this by using colored paper with sugar syrup.
 * After this discovery he labeled his bee's with a coded dot system and observed they're behaviors once they found the said paper with sugar syrup.
 * These bees returned to the hive and displayed a motion we would call a dance.
 * The Sweeter the scent the more lively or lengthy the dance tended to be.
 * The weaker the scent the slower and shorter the dance became, until it was no more.
 * //the round dance//**
 * The bee's displayed a 'round' dance when directing it's fellow insect towards the syrup source that was less than 50m's away.
 * The pace of this dance sped up or slowed down depending on how far the food source was in relation to the hive.
 * //the tail waging dance//**
 * This dance is displayed when the distance to a sweet nectar source is farther than 50m away from the hive.
 * The pace is also determined by the distance and slows down the motions depending on how far away the source happens to be.

//**Distance of 200 - 4500m increased from .5 seconds to 4 seconds of tail waging.**//


 * Also determined that bee's use the sun when directing their comrades.
 * Due to the bees ability to see polarized light from the blue sky, these bees can also use this light to know where the sun is and then proceed to direct via dance in the direction of the nectar, even within the hive.
 * The bee's would use the shadow off of a vertical comb to depict where the sun was depending on the time of day.
 * When clouds moved over the sun, bees were observed dancing in a disoriented way.

**American Biologists & A.M Wenner**

 * Disagree that bee's use the sun when directing fellow foragers to a source.
 * Believe it is simply the result of the bees olfactory sense.
 * Ran test's where bee's weren't using the vertical comb, casting a shadow, as a way to direct the bees.

**It was determined / discovered that these said bee's were of the //Apis Florea// family, and are far more primitive than the bee's Von Frisch studied.**

//**Cool Points:**//
- Flowers adapted / evolved certain colors to attract worthy insects. - The blue sky looks like a pattern to the bees.


 * Connection to Bickerton:**
 * Bee dances, the bee ACS, like the chemical signatures which function as the ant ACS, are notable because they achieve **displacement** (131). That is, the information communicated is distant in both time and space from the act of communicating it. The communication remains meaningful even in the absence of the thing being communicated about. This quality, in Bickerton's opinion, is unique among ACSs, and is a direct consequence of the bees' and ants' need to cooperatively exploit food sources. This same pressure is what Bickerton hypothesizes drove the development of language in human communities.