Did you know that honeybees can dance? But they don’t dance just for fun; they dance to share important information with the other bees in their hive. This special bee dance is called the waggle dance, and it helps honeybees communicate about the floral sources they find. When bees visit flowers, they also help plants grow through something called pollination.
When a honeybee finds a flower full of sweet nectar or pollen, she flies back to the hive to tell her sisters. Instead of talking, she dances! The waggle dance is a special kind of bee behavior where the bee wiggles her body while moving in a figure-eight shape. The direction, angle to the sun, and the intensity of her vibrations that she dances tell the other bees which way to fly, and the speed of her wiggle shows how far the flowers are.
Why do bees need flowers, and why do flowers need bees? Flowers give bees nectar and pollen. Nectar is a sweet liquid syrup that bees drink and then turn into honey, and pollen is a yellow powdery substance that bees use for protein. When bees collect pollen, they also drop some of it from flower to flower, which helps the plant reproduce. This is called pollination. Pollination helps flowers grow seeds, and seeds grow into fruits and vegetables. Without bees, we wouldn’t have many of the foods we eat, like apples, blueberries, cucumbers, and pumpkins.
Their waggle dance helps the hive find the best flowers for the honeybee colony, and their visits to flowers help plants grow and make our food. So the next time you see a bee buzzing by, remember she might be dancing soon to tell her friends about the tasty flowers she found! Try planting bee-friendly flowers like lavender and sunflowers in your garden.
