Beekeeping For Beginners: Central Beekeepers Alliance : Project RoboBee: Can a Robot Learn the Bees’ Waggle Dance?

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Central Beekeepers Alliance : Project RoboBee: Can a Robot Learn the Bees’ Waggle Dance?

Project RoboBee: Can a Robot Learn the Bees’ Waggle Dance?

Posted: 22 Aug 2011 10:45 AM PDT

Can a robot bee learn to do the “waggle dance” well enough to fool honeybees into following its directions?

At the Free University of Berlin, researchers are working on a mechanical bee they hope will be able to communicate with real bees about the location and quality of a food source. The implications for pollination services are enormous — if the robot bee can master the complex “waggle dance” language of bees, could it encourage a colony to work a field of canola rather than, say, more attractive wildflower forage in another direction?

What an idea! But it’s a steep learning curve for the scientists and their robot bee, according to Rebecca J. Rosen’s article in The Atlantic online:

So far, the dancing robotic bee has not been able to successfully communicate the location of a new food source, according to a new paper in PLoS ONE. The scientists list a couple of possible reasons: For starters, the robot can’t seem to get enough other bees to pay attention to its dance for long enough, perhaps because of a lack of buzzing wings (whose role in the waggle dance is unknown), sufficient body heat, or legs for creating vibrations in the honey comb. It’s also possible that chemicals on robot are off-putting to the other bees.