How do bees tell each other about distant pollination sites? With a bumbling dance.
The “waggle dance” has long been known to scientists. Now an algorithm developed by BYU students, with guidance from computer-science professor Sean Warnick, can decode the dance in real time.
Warnick’s budding apiarists hope to build a pill-shaped robot bee. “If we can get the robot to dance, we can put the robot in the hive and tell the bees where we want them to [pollinate],” Warnick says.
Warnick acknowledges that creating a convincing bee is a “long shot,” but his students are nevertheless abuzz with enthusiasm. The project, he says, “gives them a concrete application where they can test the theory and methods we teach them in the classroom.”
