Many people have heard about how bees dance to communicate, but do you know why? To share where the best flowers can be found! Nectar ranges in water content, the sweetest nectar being about 40% while the most dilute is about 80%. The sweeter the nectar, the less work the bees must do to dry out the nectar to 18% to turn it into honey.
While there are several dances the bees perform, the most famous is the “waggle dance”, a highly sophisticated dance accurately indicating the location and distance of a flower patch. The returning forager bee measures the angle from the sun compared to the location of the flower patch, communicating that angle via the angle of the waggle. The length of her waggle corresponds to the distance away. Her enthusiasm for the dance tells her sisters the quality of the nectar.
Let’s imagine you’re a worker bee, carrying out your business in the dark inside your hive and another bee walks over, smelling like a delicious flower. Then she bumps you. She is so excited, she’s vibrating! She continues her dance, this one is a figure-8, with a waggle in the middle.
You use your antennae to feel her movements and taste the samples of the nectar she shares. Her dance gives you the equivalent of a GPS location for a patch of flowers. Her enthusiasm is infectious and you head out of the hive, “beelining” to that same patch of flowers. Then you return and dance to share your bounty as well.
Once you return to the hive, you dispel your nectar, dance for your sisters and recruit more bees to your favorite flower patch. Then you’re off again in search of more nectar. But how the bees move this nectar into the honeycomb is a fascinating process, click here to read about it.
Just think, you fuel your body with this same raw honey every time you drink one of our refreshing beverages, filling up on antioxidants, enzymes, and probiotics. Bee here to taste some of that delicious raw honey-turned-session-mead this Memorial Day weekend – with 13 session meads on tap, cocktails including one zero proof cocktail, a house made kombucha and honey elixir soda, we have something for ALL the people in your life.
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