Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Honeybee Waggle-Run Tuning

So today I was reading a paper by Seeley/Buhrman on nest-site selection in honey bees ("Nest site-selection in honey bees: how well do swarms implement the ``best-of-N'' decision rule?"). Now, if you're not familiar, bees communicate via dance. It's pretty fascinating. However, it leads to some funny passages.
A dancing bee tunes her dance strength by adjusting the number of waggle-runs/dance, and she adjusts the number of waggle-runs/dance by changing both the duration and the rate of her waggle-run production.

WAGGLE-RUNS... Hmm....

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