- Joined
- Dec 3, 2017
- Messages
- 26,290
- Reaction score
- 16,771
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/honey-bees-rally-their-queen-game-telephone [subscription]
“Buzz. Buzz. The queen is that way,” said one honey bee to another. “Pass it on.”
Honey bees can’t speak, of course, but scientists have found that the insects combine teamwork and odor chemicals to relay the queen’s location to the rest of the colony, revealing an extraordinary means of long distance, mass communication.
The research is “really nice, and really careful,” says Gordon Berman, a biologist at Emory University who was not involved in the study. It shows once again, he says, that insects are capable of “exquisite and complex behaviors.”
Honey bees communicate with chemicals called pheromones, which they sense through their antennae. Like a monarch pressing a button, the queen emits pheromones to summon worker bees to fulfill her needs. But her pheromones only travel so far. Busy worker bees, however, roam around, and they, too, can call to each other by releasing a pheromone called Nasanov, through a gesticulation known as “scenting; they raise their abdomens to expose their pheromone glands and fan their wings to direct the smelly chemicals backward (seen in the video above, and close-up in the video below).
=====================================================================
I've been fascinated by chemical communication & its role in social insects like bees.
Nasanov pheromone is a mixture of the terpenoids citral & geraniol in a 2:1 ratio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasonov_pheromone
“Buzz. Buzz. The queen is that way,” said one honey bee to another. “Pass it on.”
Honey bees can’t speak, of course, but scientists have found that the insects combine teamwork and odor chemicals to relay the queen’s location to the rest of the colony, revealing an extraordinary means of long distance, mass communication.
The research is “really nice, and really careful,” says Gordon Berman, a biologist at Emory University who was not involved in the study. It shows once again, he says, that insects are capable of “exquisite and complex behaviors.”
Honey bees communicate with chemicals called pheromones, which they sense through their antennae. Like a monarch pressing a button, the queen emits pheromones to summon worker bees to fulfill her needs. But her pheromones only travel so far. Busy worker bees, however, roam around, and they, too, can call to each other by releasing a pheromone called Nasanov, through a gesticulation known as “scenting; they raise their abdomens to expose their pheromone glands and fan their wings to direct the smelly chemicals backward (seen in the video above, and close-up in the video below).
=====================================================================
I've been fascinated by chemical communication & its role in social insects like bees.
Nasanov pheromone is a mixture of the terpenoids citral & geraniol in a 2:1 ratio. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasonov_pheromone
Last edited: