Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On ....

[gavin]

I've seen a lot of shaking this week. Usually worker on worker shaking, but also worker on queen cell. I wonder what the queen cell one means, if anything. They're such expressive creatures, bees!!

This signal is the rhythmic up and down shaking, the one that seems to mean: 'Get lively!'. Tom Seeley wrote a paper on it and indicated that it most commonly preceded the waggle dance and seemed to be an attempt to make bees receptive to the message to come.

The receiving bee usually freezes, but on a couple of occasions in this video the receiving bee 'submits' in the way it would if it had begged for grooming (the other shaking signal, a side to side flicking of the abdomen). The submission signal (shown me by a member of this forum) is a curling down and out the way of the tip of the abdomen.



Oh, and that dumb Carnie in the second part seems to shake the comb a couple of times. Just can't stop itself - or maybe its trying to reach a wide audience that way.

This was one of a few YouTube videos I saved for a little display at Perth Museum today. The videos and especially the emerging baby bees from a frame of brood went down well.

[gavin]

No wonder there is all that shaking going on - there seem to be two mouths to feed in many of those cells.