Our First Contact

have been searching for intelligent species somewhere in the Universe for ages. We hope to find them. But what if we tell you we have made our first contact long ago, but we were too arrogant to understand it. For so long, humans have defined themselves as the only intelligent species on our planet. It turns out this is far from the truth. 

We have always taken bees for fascinating but silly creatures. 

We

They can be proud of possessing incredible knowledge and tremendous contributions to the planet. They solve their problems by achieving the broadest possible agreement. Something no human society can talk big for. 

In the past centuries, we have learned so much about them, thanks to many scientists and explorers. But if there is someone we owe the most, he is Karl von Frisch. He was interested in the world surrounding him and conducted many  

We have ever thought of them as slaves destined to live their life on duty to nature. And yet it is true they spend their whole lives working but this is not slavery. 

And they are far from silly too.

experiments from a very early age. He wanted to know, for example, if fish can smell or see colors. 

Bees were among the species he examined, and he 

devoted his entire life to them.

Most of what we know about bees is thanks to Karl von Frisch.

There are over 16 000 known bee species. Most of them are wild.

A bee colony has only one queen, hundreds of males, and 20 000 to 80 000 female works. Every bee has its own important role and contributes to the well-being of the hive.

One of his experiments was conducted to determine if bees can communicate. He placed a plate with sugar syrup near the hive he was studying and started waiting. When the first bee from the hive arrived, he decided to mark it. Just after the first flew away, others from the same colony started to come. 

He started to move the plate farther away from the hive as, in the end, he reached several kilometers from the original location. Bees always managed to find the plate and were still from this particular hive. How was that possible?

He used sugar syrup instead of honey, so bees were not able to smell it. The other bees did not tract the marked one. So how was this possible? When he took a closer look at the actions of the marked bee, he realized she was dancing. And these were not the silly movements of one stupid creature. With her movements, the bee was able to tell the others the direction where the food source was located and the distance from the hive. The bee even took the speed of the wind and other obstacles in mind to give more accurate information.

It turns out bees can exchange information very accurately through dances.

Many experiments followed the original one, and thanks to Karl von Frisch today, we know much more about bees than ever before. Humans have seen and used bees for thousands of years, but no one before Frisch looked at them in that way.

Today we know bees sleep, and some argue they even dream. They can communicate through dances, which are not just spontaneous movements but are tightly linked with calculations of angles, speeds, and distances. This ranks them among the most intelligent species on our planet. And this is not everything.

Bees originate from wasps that eat meat, but in the early formation of their kind, they became vegetarians. We think this happened because sometimes wasps brought pollen to their little ones when they did not manage to catch meat for dinner. With time an entirely new species evolved, and incredible biodiversity in plants followed. Before bees, flowers were very simple, but when they emerged, flowers started to get more complex and vibrant. They also started creating tasty nectars to award bees.

With bees, an incredible diversity of flowering plants and trees evolved.

Bees can be proud of having the most democratic form of governance we know. The queen is not a title that is inherited. The hive is not a monarchy. Every bee worker can become a queen with the right care and can create its colony. Although people were in contact with bees for so long, 

they never realized the presence of another intelligent kind here on earth and the fact it is not necessary to look into space first. But just like in every movie about the first contact with another type, there is bloodshed, and our story is not different.

Today a frightening amount of bees die every day. People might have built their spectacular cities and might have achieved mind-blowing levels of development, but bees have their essential role in nature. A role whose lack might cause a system failure. It depends on us how our story of the first contact will end.

NEXT

THE DEATH OF INSECTS

Although their billions we humans managed to kill even them. Insects are dying at alarming rates. Learn why this is a big problem.

WORDS

slavery  noun - the state of being a slave

track  verb - follow the trail or movements

spontaneous  adjective - performed or occurring as a result of a sudden impulse

emerge  verb - become apparent or prominent.

mind-blowing  adjective - overwhelmingly impressive

FURTHER READING

The Beguiling History of Bees [Excerpt] - By Dave Goulson on April 25, 2014. Published on Scientific American. - “The first bees existed around 130 million years ago at a time when our own ancestors were small, ratlike creatures”

Colony Collapse Disorder: A Descriptive Study - Published: August 3, 2009

Search: Bees communicate through dances. The so-called Waggle Dance.

Search for ways you can support local bee colonies by planting flowering plants in your garden.