"Radar has helped resolve a long-standing controversy about the purpose of a strange dance performed by bees, Nature magazine reports.

The famous "waggle" dance contains information about the whereabouts of nectar, just as was originally proposed in the 1960s, scientists now claim.

The theory met with scepticism, partly because people did not believe bees could decode such a complex message. But now radar tracking has proved they do follow waggle dance instructions."

The bee doing the dancing is another entity separate from themselves.

This may not seem much, but it takes human children around 2 years before they can recognise that there are such things as other entities. If one child in a room of babies starts crying then more often than not the other babies will start to cry too, because they have no sense that the crying is being uttered from someone other than themselves. This empathy for others can also be seen in the first few hours after birth as babies will replicate facial expressions acted out by those around them.

The fact that one bee can compute the information attained by another and act on it individually is quite astounding. This does not imply of course that a bee has a deep sense of 'self', but 3rd person observation would suggest that the low level, individual behaviour the bees exhibit combines to produce the higher level organised system obvious in the hive as a whole. This, I suggest, is no different from human society. We are simply bees in a hive following simple rules which, from a higher perspective, seem to produce highly complex patterns of behaviour.

Categories: Science, Nature, Humanity, News

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