Bees may do a quantum dance
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For 70 years, scientists have known that honeybees tell the
other bees in their hive where the good nectar is by doing an
elaborate bee dance. The dance of the honeybee is one of
the most intricate communications in nature. But how can a
tiny animal with only a few million neurons possibly possess all
the information needed to carry it out? The answer: it may
be a quantum dance.
Scientists who study these movements have experiemented
with moving the hives closer and farther away from the food
source, then examining the resulting dances. Mathematician
Barbara Shipman has discovered that the movements of the
dancing bees can be predicted by a mathematical formula
called a "flag manifold," which expresses movement in the
world of the tiny particles known as quarks. In mathematical
terms, a manifold is a basic shape. She made this discovery
when she projected the six dimensions of a flag manifold onto
a two dimensional piece of paper. She was amazed to see
that she was recreating the form of the bees' dance.
It may be that the bee's brain, while it seems simple
compared to ours, actually works in a completely different,
and more sophisticated, way: it may be quark-sensitive.
Adam Frank writes in Discover.com that scientists don't
understand how honeybees, who have very tiny brains, are
able to achieve such an elaborate form of communication.
Karl Von Frisch's Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, in
which he interpreted bee dances, was published in 1965. One
of the movements he recorded bees making is what he called
the waggle dance, in which it moves in two arcs bisected by
a central line. Frank writes, "The bee starts by making a short
straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes.
Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to
the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down
the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and
returns once again to the starting point?The central waggling
part of the dance is the most important. To convey the
direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the
waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up
and down?If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the
food source, and another line connecting the hive and the
spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed
by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run
to the imaginary vertical line?the bees must also tell their
hive mates how far to go to get to the food. The shape or
geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food
source changes?The closer the food source is to the hive,
the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs."
If you receive our
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that the Search for
Extraterres
trial Intelligence finds in the universe is because ET doesn't
communica
te with sparks but with quarks. If so, they're liable to
contact the honeybee before they even realize that we HAVE
minds..."
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