Every day honey bees travel across field forests and farmland in search of flowers full of nectar and pollen.

But did you know when they come back to the hive, they communicat to the other bees where those.

Flowers are by performing a little dance?

[music] Back in 1973, Austrian entomologist Kar von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for cracking the cod of the honeybees waggle dance.

He discovere that bees use this unique dance to tell each other where to find food, how far away it is, and which direction to fly.

His set up was simple.

A glass observation hive, artificial feeders and bees marked with little number tags.

Today, researchers at Virginia Tech are using that same classic approach to challenge some outdated assumptions about honeybee behavior.

My name is Dr.

Maggie Couvillon.

I'm an associate professor of pollinator biology in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech.

We're part of a collaboration with Penn State and with Cornell, and the larger project is investigating how honeybees forage on organic farms with the ultimate goal of updating the current regulations that stipulate what is needed for a beekeeper to sell organic honey.

Under current USDA regulations, honey labeled organic must come from Hive, surrounded by over six kilometers of uncontaminated land.

The problem is, that's nearly impossibl to find in the continental U.S.. If we took the apiary, that's right next door to us that 6.4 kilometer radius would encompas half of the town of Blacksburg, So in the contiguous U.S., it's very difficult to meet those standards we want to see if a honeybee is flight duration or the amount of time it takes her to fly out to a resource and then back to the hive would be a good indicator of how far away from the hive she flew.

Then that way we can use that information to automate a system that will then estimate where bees are going on these organic landscapes.

So if you were to sit by a patch of flowers and you saw one bee come and she foraging on those flowers, over time, that one bee will become many bees.

So it's obvious that that bee is recruiting.

and we've known that they do this strange behavior inside the hive called the waggle dance for a long time.

The waggle dance is how honey bees tell their hive where to find food.

The bee moves in a figure eight.

Moving her body very quickly from side to side advancing linearly on the comb.

Then she turns either left or right to come back to the start and do it all over again.

The angle and duration of the dance communicates the location of the resource down to the direction from the su and its distance from the hive.

This middle portion where she's moving her body.

That's the information rich portion of the dance.

That's where the distance and the direction are being communicated.

So straight up is like zero degrees.

if she's dancing with her head to the right, it's a 90 degree angle.

if the bee is dancing with he head down, she's making an angle of 180 degrees.

If she's dancing with her hea to the left, it's 270 degrees.

So the angle that she makes with her body is the angle from the hiv to the food relative to the sun.

Distance from the hive is communicated by the duration of the dance.

To determine that data, researchers first had to mark the bees with numbers so they could track them.

Then they had to train the to fly to feeders at different known distance away from the observation hive.

It's kind of like training a dog or a cat to follow you.

As long as they continue knowing where that food source is, they'll find it and they'll continue drinking from it.

So we were able to get bees to follow us to a feeder between 50 meters, all the way up to 600 meters away from the hive.

So if the bee is dancing for about one second, she' communicating about 650 meters.

It's a linear relationship and if she dances for 2 seconds, she' communicating about 1300 meters.

Honeybees are really unique and amazing in how far they can fly.

They can, in fact, forage at ten kilometers, but they don't often forage at ten kilometers.

And a lot of the work that my lab is doing has shown that if we look at 11,000 foraging trips, the average distance is 0.8 kilometers and that it's less than 1% that's actually going ten kilometers.

So given that there' very little biological relevance to that 6.4 kilometer radius circle.

The question is, can we show that with large number of bees to perhaps generate the data needed to update those regulations and say we don't need 6.4 kilometers, maybe we can do it with just three team hopes conclusion made in the combined experiment will modernize organic hone standards, making certification more accessible for beekeepers already doing the work.

things that add diversity and nutrition to our diet.

These things ar they're completely or partially thanks to bees and of the bees, the honeybee reall has the biggest economic clout.

They are our most consequential pollinator of the foods that we eat.

And so as it's harder for the native bees and as it's harder for beekeepers to be able to keep manage honeybees, it's harder than for our crops to get pollinated.

And if we like our food, we need to have our crops pollinated.

waggle dance might be an ancient signal between bees, but it could shape the future of sustainable farming.

One small step and one shake at a time.

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