Exalted be God, the King, the Real. There is no deity but Him, Lord of the Noble Throne. (Surat al-Muminun: 116)

Scientists have performed a great deal of research to determine how the order is maintained in the hive, in which tens of thousands of bees live. A large number of academic studies have been carried out to that end as well. One prominent expert and professor at the University of Munich, the Australian zoologist Karl von Frisch, has devoted an entire 350-page book to bee communication, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees.

How Do Bees Communicate?

To find food, bees must usually search wide areas and fly long distances. When a bee finds a new source of food, it immediately returns to the hive to inform the other members of the colony. Shortly afterwards, other bees begin flying around the source.

Bees are deaf, and cannot therefore establish communications by means of sound.72 Nevertheless, they are able to communicate the location of a food source to the other members of the colony with no difficulty. The methods they employ are quite extraordinary.

Scientists studying how bees inform each other of the places they find made a most astonishing discovery. Bees "describe" the location of a distant place by dancing. All the information that other bees need to find the food source-its distance from the hive, its direction, productivity-is encoded in this dance.

Once it locates a new food source, the bee returns to the hive and starts repeating specific movements in such a way as to attract the other bees' attention. All the information they need about the food source can be obtained from the bee's general behavior. For instance, if a bee simply returns to the hive, deposits its load of collected pollen and flies off again, this means that the source that the bee used is either already known or else not very productive. At times when water is scarce, they'll also use this dance to describe the location of water.73

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• 72. Alex Hawes, “What the Buzz is All About,” Zoogoer, September-October 1995, http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/ZooGoer/1995/6/buzzabout.cfm.
• 73. Karl von Frisch, Arilarin Hayati (The Life of Bees), pp.135-136.

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