고등학교 공통영어1 (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

A honeybee that finds flowers rich in nectar cannot draw a map or call out directions to her hive mates. Yet within minutes of her return, other workers often fly straight to the same flowers. Their guide is a dance performed on the honeycomb inside the dark hive.

Much of what we know about this dance comes from Karl von Frisch, who studied bees for decades. One of the most useful tools in his research was a hive with glass walls. He set out dishes of sugar water and marked each bee that fed there with a small colored dot. He then watched the bees marked in this way as they came back and danced.

A bee returning from food near the hive performs a round dance, running in small circles and often switching direction. This dance tells the other bees to search close to the hive. There, the flower scent carried on the dancer's body helps them find the right blossoms. When von Frisch moved a dish farther away, however, the round dance turned into a waggle dance.

In this dance, the bee runs straight ahead while shaking her body from side to side and then circles back to her starting point. Because she circles back to the right and to the left by turns, her path traces a figure eight. One of the most surprising parts of the dance is the way it shows direction. On the upright comb, moving straight up stands for flying toward the sun. A run tilted 30 degrees to the right of the vertical means the food lies 30 degrees to the right of the sun. How long the run lasts tells the distance: the longer the bee waggles, the farther away the food is.

Picture a hive with three gardens nearby on a sunny morning. A rose garden lies toward the sun, an apple orchard lies directly away from it, and a sunflower field lies 90 degrees to the left of the sun. All three are far enough for a waggle dance, but the orchard is the farthest.

In 1973, von Frisch shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Today, the waggle dance is still one of the best-known examples of communication among animals.