Dancing on a swarm looking for a new home
With the help of dances, bees can report information not only about sources of nectar and pollen, but also about other purposes of their flights, for example, about the location of puddles with suitable water for collection, which is needed not only for quenching thirst, but also sometimes in large quantities for cooling the hive, or where you can harvest propolis from the buds of trees, to smear the hive and seal up the cracks in it. Of particular interest are the dances of scouts looking for a dwelling and informing the bee swarm of the place suitable for nest.
Immediately after the swarming, the bees gather around the uterus in a swarm of bunches, which hangs in most cases on some nearby tree. It is the duty of the intelligence bees to find shelter for a new bee family: a tree hollow, a rock cleft, a cavity in the wall, an empty hive or something like that. Dozens of bee-scouts are sent in different directions. It takes a little time, and one here, another there finds some place that is taken into account, even if it is located at a distance of several kilometers. The lucky scouts, returning, dance on the surface of the bunch of grapes and show the direction and distance to the shelter they found, just like the bee pickers indicate the direction and distance to the source of the feed.
On a bee swarm you can observe dancing scouts, the number of which is continuously increasing. Some of them indicate small, others, on the contrary, are quite considerable distances; one bee shows one, the other – another direction in accordance with the location of the discovered dwelling. At the same time, it is striking that the mobilization of bees by different scouts takes place with unequal energy. As with a very rich bribe or concentrated nectar, the mobilization dances of bees are very lively, and with a diminishing intake of nectar they become weaker and weaker, and the intelligence bees
The nature of their dances depends on many reasons: the size of the hollow, the location of the tap and its protection from the wind (there should not be a draft in the living room), and even from the smell inside the hollow that should be pleasing to the bees, and who knows how many more such things!!
For several hours, and sometimes even a few days, something amazing is happening. The most energetic dancers are gaining more and more supporters among their comrades, who, having studied the place chosen by bees-dancers and convinced of its merits, are themselves intensively propagandizing it with the help of dances.
Dancers, who previously tried to steer a swarm into a less suitable dwelling, are also infected with vortex movements of more successful scouts and sometimes allow themselves to be “overconfident.” First they rush for their “competitors”, dancing on the bunch of grapes, and then, following their instructions, inspect the dwelling chosen by them and finally send the bees there. Many of those bees who can not defend the dwelling chosen by them with the same energy as the other, happier scouts, in the course of this course of events, simply cease to dance.
Thus, everyone comes to a common agreement, dancing together in one direction, and as soon as this happens, the bunch of bunches breaks up and under the leadership of hundreds of their friends who already know the way, the bees fly to the housing recognized as the best one found.
Man really has something to learn from bees. But, instead of seeing how they, to everyone’s satisfaction, agree on different opinions, he collects a swarm into the square, rudely destroying the natural course of events in his own interests.
The meaning of the dance of bees for beekeeping and agriculture.
Anyone who travels abroad, knowing the appropriate language, will get more pleasure and benefit from the trip than his companion who does not know a foreign language. The situation is similar with the beekeeper in his relations with bees. Knowing their “language”, he gets the opportunity to make bees better serve his purposes.
When the time of the main bribe is over, some plants continue to bloom. However, their nectar fountains are not as plentiful as they were a few weeks ago. An experienced beekeeper knows that the flowers of the osier, stretching now hundreds of thousands of their tall, surrounded by green-colored flower heads, could give him a few more kilograms of honey.
But bees no longer have a real desire for collective activity. On the heads of the osseous can be found mainly by bumblebees. They have an advantage.
Before the bees, thanks to their longer proboscis, and the nectar in the flowers of these plants is not so much that the dances could significantly enhance their visit to the bees. The beekeeper wants to tell his bees that they should not sit at home without work and should try to get out of the heads of the sow, what else there is.
He can do this if he knows their language. It is enough for him to attract a few bees from the families of his apiary with a small amount of honey or sugar syrup for a bouquet of sows and feed them on his flowers, sprinkled with sugar syrup. Upon returning home, these bees dance, reporting with the help of the smell they brought about the open source of the bribe and the purpose of their mobilization appeal. Soon, their friends begin to fly out of the hive and look for the smell of sow. Visiting the heads of the sow grows many times.
In practice, this method was changed and simplified in every possible way. Instead of feeding the bees on the flowers of the sow, you can give them sugar syrup with the aroma of flowers in the hive in the hive. Such a syrup is obtained by insisting a pure sugar syrup for several hours on the flowers of the sow. Flowers of other species, the smell of which changes after being immersed in sugar syrup, as a result of which they become unsuitable for this purpose, put in the trough dry and, pouring a little sugar syrup into it, put before the bee colonel. As a result, by spending little effort, it is possible to receive higher fees of honey from the osseous and from other honey plants at such times when bees collect nothing on neighboring apiaries.
Agronomists also often need to send bees to certain plants to improve their pollination and tying seeds. So, for example, obtaining the much needed seeds of one of our most important forage plants, red clover, is a difficult and unreliable business.
Bees can not easily reach out with their short proboscis to the base of a flower tube to extract the nectar from these bumblebee flowers. Wherever the red clover is systematically cultivated on the fields, the bumblebees are too small to pollinate millions of individual flowers, and the bees do not show any desire to visit the fields of red clover that do not differ in the abundance of nectar, and are more likely to turn to more reliable sources of bribes. Only in isolated, rare years, when red clover allocates a lot of nectar, bees are more willing to visit it. Usually the yields of clover seeds are low.
This grief, however, is easy to help. At the edge of the clover field put hives with bees. Then, using the above method, with the help of a syrup with the smell of red clover flowers, bees are mobilized, thus achieving an increase in its attendance. This method increases the yield of seeds by an average of 40%. Thanks to reliable harvests, the reception of “controlling the flying activity of bees with the help of the smell” (training) quickly attracted the attention of experienced seed growers. Applied so far only in some localities, it will certainly soon become widespread in areas of intensive farming. After all, in order to send bees to work, using their own “language”, it takes a little effort, but this method helps the beekeeper to fill the barrels with honey and gives big incomes to agriculture.
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