4 January 2010 Macquarie University

Dancing honey bees: Image: iStockphoto

The brain of a honey bee is very tiny - about the size of sesame seeds. BUT these bees behave in such an advanced way. Scientists find it hard to believe how clever they are. New research has found that the bee brain can work out how much energy it will spend finding pollen. To make honey, bees must gather nectar from flowers. The big problem is that they must not use too much energy collecting it. So they need to know how much energy they will use looking for nectar. When bees come back from their honey search, they communicate with the other bees in the colony they tell the others where they have been and how good the nectar was by doing the waggle dance". They can tell the other bees how much energy they had used to find nectar. How did they do that? The bee brain is very simple but they can communicate two things: how far they travelled

and how much energy they used. They can communicate both these in their dance language. This is why bees are so good at getting nectar. The researcher said that "Bees are beautiful little animals with great personalities - and we're only just getting a sense of how smart they really are."