Riley J R, Greggers U, Smith A D, Reynolds D R, Menzel R
Plant and Invertebrate Ecology Division, Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Hertfordshire AL5 2JQ, UK.
Nature. 2005 May 12;435(7039):205-7. doi: 10.1038/nature03526.
In the 'dance language' of honeybees, the dancer generates a specific, coded message that describes the direction and distance from the hive of a new food source, and this message is displaced in both space and time from the dancer's discovery of that source. Karl von Frisch concluded that bees 'recruited' by this dance used the information encoded in it to guide them directly to the remote food source, and this Nobel Prize-winning discovery revealed the most sophisticated example of non-primate communication that we know of. In spite of some initial scepticism, almost all biologists are now convinced that von Frisch was correct, but what has hitherto been lacking is a quantitative description of how effectively recruits translate the code in the dance into flight to their destinations. Using harmonic radar to record the actual flight paths of recruited bees, we now provide that description.
在蜜蜂的“舞蹈语言”中，跳舞的蜜蜂会生成一种特定的、编码的信息，描述新食物源相对于蜂巢的方向和距离，而这个信息在空间和时间上都与蜜蜂发现该食物源的地点相分离。卡尔·冯·弗里施得出结论，被这种舞蹈“招募”的蜜蜂利用其中编码的信息直接导向远处的食物源，这一获得诺贝尔奖的发现揭示了我们所知的非灵长类动物最复杂的交流实例。尽管一开始有人持怀疑态度，但现在几乎所有生物学家都确信冯·弗里施是正确的，然而迄今为止一直缺少的是对被招募的蜜蜂如何有效地将舞蹈中的编码转化为飞向目的地的飞行的定量描述。我们现在利用谐波雷达记录被招募蜜蜂的实际飞行路径，给出了这样的描述。
