...gathering nectar from a flower bed. Although simple in appearance, the act is a performance of high virtuosity. The forager was guided to this spot by dances of her nestmates that contained symbolic information about the direction, distance and quality of the nectar source. To reach her destination, she traveled the bee equivalent of hundreds of human miles at bee-equivalent supersonic speed. She has arrived at an hour when the flowers are most likely to be richly productive. Now she closely inspects the willing blossoms by touch and smell and extracts the nectar with intricate movements of her legs and proboscis. Then she flies home in a straight line. All this she accomplishes with a brain the size of a grain of sand and with little or no prior experience."
Opening paragrah from The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies, Bert Holldubler and Edward O. Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment