The Waggle Dance

Colony

Chapter 14: The Waggle Dance

The bee came in hot. Meg used the word "hot" for a forager returning with urgency, with the flight speed and the body language that indicated a productive source, a forager who had found something worth telling the colony about, something that warranted recruitment, that warranted the most sophisticated act of communication in the insect world, the act that Karl von Frisch had spent his career decoding and that had earned him the Nobel Prize in 1973 and that Meg watched on the frames in her hives with the familiarity of a person who had been reading this language for thirty years and who still found it astonishing, the astonishment not diminished by familiarity but refined by it, the way a translator's astonishment at a foreign language's capacity for precision is refined rather than diminished by fluency.

The bee landed on the frame and immediately began to dance.

The waggle dance. The figure eight. The bee moved in a straight line across the comb surface — the waggle run — vibrating her abdomen from side to side as she walked, the vibration producing a sound audible to the bees around her, a low-frequency buzz that attracted attention, that said: watch me, I have information, the information is about food. At the end of the waggle run she circled back to the starting point — a loop to the left — and ran the straight line again, waggling, buzzing, and circled back — a loop to the right — and the figure eight was complete, one cycle, and she repeated it, cycle after cycle, the repetition being the emphasis, the biological equivalent of saying something loudly enough and long enough that the listeners could not ignore it.

"Watch the angle," Meg said.

She and Luz were standing over a hive in the home apiary, the inner cover off, the top bars exposed, the frame she had pulled alive with bees and with the dancer in the lower left quadrant of the comb, the bee tracing her figure eights among the workers who had stopped to attend to her, the audience forming around the dancer the way an audience always formed, drawn by the sound and the movement and the pheromone the dancer released — Nasonov pheromone, the same orientation pheromone used to mark the hive entrance, the scent that said: here, pay attention, this is important.

"The angle of the waggle run relative to vertical on the comb corresponds to the angle of the food source relative to the sun," Meg said. "Vertical is the direction of the sun. If she runs straight up, the source is in the direction of the sun. If she runs thirty degrees to the left of vertical, the source is thirty degrees to the left of the sun. The comb is a map. Vertical is the sun. The dance is the compass bearing."

Luz leaned in. Her veil was close to the frame, the mesh between her face and the bees, the bees walking on the mesh without concern, without the defensive posture that would have indicated agitation, the bees accustomed to the inspection, the smoke having done its work, the colony in the altered state that the smoker induced, the state that allowed Meg and Luz to stand over the open hive and watch a bee dance without being stung more than occasionally.

"She's running about forty-five degrees to the right of vertical," Luz said.

"So the source is forty-five degrees to the right of the sun's current position. The sun is — " Meg looked up, gauged the sun's position through the overcast, the bright spot in the gray sky that indicated ten o'clock, roughly southeast. "The sun is roughly southeast. Forty-five degrees to the right of southeast is roughly south-southwest." She pointed. "That way. The McKenzie clover field."

"And the distance?"

"The duration of the waggle run. The longer the run, the farther the source. Each second of waggle corresponds to approximately one kilometer. She's running about — " Meg watched the dance, timed the waggle run against her internal clock. "About three-quarters of a second. So approximately seven hundred to eight hundred meters."

"The McKenzie field is about that far."

"Yes."

"So you just read her mail."

"I read her mail."

The phrase was Luz's, the humor was Luz's, the quality of light irreverence that Luz brought to the apiary and that Meg had initially found unfamiliar and had come to find necessary, the way a colony found incoming pollen necessary not because pollen was honey but because pollen was protein and protein was what the brood needed, and without protein the brood could not develop and without developing brood the colony could not grow and the pollen was essential even though the pollen was not the thing the colony was building toward, the pollen was the thing that enabled the building, and Luz's humor was the pollen — the nutrient that enabled Meg to say things she would not otherwise say, to explain things she would not otherwise explain, to open the hive of her knowledge and show what was inside.

"The intensity of the dance indicates quality," Meg said. She was watching the dancer, the vigor of the waggle, the enthusiasm — though "enthusiasm" was an anthropomorphism that Meg corrected in her mind even as she used it, the bee not being enthusiastic but being chemically compelled, the neural circuits that drove the dance being calibrated to the sugar concentration of the nectar, the higher the concentration the more vigorous the dance, the vigor being a reliable signal of quality because the vigor was involuntary, was produced by the neural response to the sweetness, the bee's brain translating the taste on her proboscis into the movement of her body, the sweetness becoming the dance, the chemistry becoming the communication.

"This dancer is vigorous," Meg said. "The waggle is pronounced. The runs are long. The repetitions are many. This is a high-quality source. Concentrated nectar. Probably the clover — clover nectar is typically around forty percent sugar, which is high, which is the kind of source that produces vigorous dances, which recruits more foragers, which results in more of the colony's foraging force being directed to this source, which results in more of this nectar being brought into the hive, which results in more of this honey being produced, and the honey from this source will be the light, mild, clear honey that the customers prefer, and the customers' preference and the bees' preference are, in this case, aligned, both of them valuing the thing that is sweet and concentrated and pure."

She set the frame back in the hive. She pulled another. On this frame, another dancer, this one less vigorous — shorter waggle runs, fewer repetitions, the angle different, indicating a different direction, a different source.

"This one," Meg said. "Less vigorous. The source is less concentrated. Probably the blackberry — blackberry nectar is lower in sugar, maybe twenty-five to thirty percent, and the distance is greater, maybe a kilometer and a half. The bee is reporting honestly: the source exists, but it's not as good as the clover. The colony will send some foragers there but not as many, the recruitment will be lower, the investment smaller. The colony allocates its foraging force by the quality of the information. The best dancers recruit the most followers. The most followers go to the best sources. The allocation is optimal. The allocation is honest. The allocation works because the communication is honest."

She said the word "honest" and she heard herself say it and the word hung in the air between her and Luz the way the word had been hanging in the air of her life for years, the word that was the center of everything she knew about bees and the periphery of everything she knew about people, the word that separated the apiary from the house, the hive from the marriage, the dance from the conversation.

"Honest," Luz said.

"The dance cannot lie. The bee cannot report a distant source as close or a poor source as rich. The angle and the duration and the vigor are produced by neural circuits that respond directly to the sensory input — the position of the sun, the distance flown, the concentration of the nectar. The bee's body converts the experience into the dance without the intermediary of intention. There is no space in the process for deception. The dance is the experience, translated into movement. The communication is the reality, expressed as behavior. There is no gap between what the bee knows and what the bee says."

The sentence sat between them. The sentence was about bees. The sentence was not about bees.

"Von Frisch spent decades proving this," Meg said, pulling the conversation back to the factual, to the entomological, to the ground where she was confident. "He set up feeding stations at known distances and directions from the hive and he watched the dances and he mapped the angles and the durations and he demonstrated that the dance was a symbolic language — the first symbolic language ever documented in a non-human animal. The angle represents the direction. The duration represents the distance. These are symbols. These are abstractions. The bee is not pointing at the food. The bee is encoding the food's location in a system of symbols that other bees can decode. And the decoding works. The recruited foragers fly the heading the dance describes and they find the food. They find it because the dancer was precise and the precision was involuntary and the involuntary precision is the honesty. The bee cannot be imprecise. The bee cannot be vague. The bee cannot say 'It's over there, sort of, I think, maybe that direction, I don't know, it was pretty far, or maybe it wasn't.' The bee says: forty-five degrees right of the sun, eight hundred meters, high sugar concentration. That is what the bee says. That is all the bee says. And what the bee says is true."

Luz was quiet for a moment. She was looking at the frame, at the second dancer who was still performing her less vigorous routine, the bee tracing her figure eights with the dedication of an organism that did not know it was communicating, that did not have the concept of communication, that was simply doing the thing its neural circuits produced in response to the sensory input of a foraging trip, the doing and the saying being the same thing, the action and the meaning inseparable.

"You wish people communicated like this," Luz said.

It was not a question. It was a reading. Luz was reading Meg the way Meg read the dance — the angle of the body, the direction of the gaze, the vigor of the explanation, the intensity that indicated not just professional enthusiasm but personal investment, the investment of a woman who valued precision and honesty and clarity and who had spent her life among organisms that communicated with precision and honesty and clarity and who went home to a species that did not.

Meg put the frame back. She closed the hive. She gave a last puff of smoke across the top bars and set the inner cover and the outer cover and stood up and looked at Luz across the closed hive and the closed hive was between them the way the words were between them and the words were between them the way the truth was between them and the truth was the thing that Meg did not say.

"I wish people communicated like bees," Meg said.

She said it and the saying was the dance, was the waggle run, was the angle and the duration and the vigor of a statement that encoded the direction and the distance and the quality of a feeling, and the feeling was not romantic, or was not only romantic, or was not romantic in the way that the word "romantic" implied — candles and declarations and the vocabulary of love as it was sold and consumed — but was romantic in the older sense, the sense that meant: I am moved, I am stirred, the thing I feel when I am near you is the thing I feel when I am in the apiary, the alignment, the fit, the sense of being in the right place with the right organism doing the right work, and the rightness is not something I chose, is not something I decided, is the neural response to the sensory input, is the involuntary precision of the body responding to the presence.

Luz did not reply. Luz did not need to reply because the dance did not require a reply, the dance required only that the audience receive the information and decide whether to act on it, and the decision was the audience's, and the dancer could not control the decision, could only provide the information, could only say: this is what I found, this is where it is, this is how good it is, and the saying was the thing, and the thing was done, and the rest was the audience's.

They moved to the next hive. They worked through the apiary. The morning's work continued in the register of work — the practical, the physical, the opening and the inspecting and the closing — and the conversation moved back to the technical, to the mite counts and the super weights and the queen assessments, the professional language of two people doing professional work, and the personal was packed away, was stored, was the honey in the cell that was not yet capped, not yet sealed, not yet at the moisture content that would stabilize it, the honey that was still raw, still being processed, still losing its excess moisture through the fanning of the bees, the evaporation that reduced the nectar to honey, that concentrated the sweetness, that transformed the raw material into the stable product.

At lunch they sat on the tailgate. Meg had packed sandwiches again — the habit established, the arithmetic of two now automatic, the two sandwiches appearing in the cooler without deliberation, the way two bees appeared at a nectar source without deliberation, the attraction being the explanation, the proximity being the reason. They ate. Luz talked about the waggle dance from the perspective of her biology training — the evolutionary origins, the hypothetical intermediate stages, the question of how a symbolic communication system could have evolved in an organism with a brain of fewer than a million neurons, the question that fascinated Luz because it sat at the intersection of neuroscience and behavior and evolution and communication, the intersection that was Luz's intellectual territory, the place where her training and her curiosity and her new practice converged.

"The dance floor is a dark vertical surface," Luz said. "The bees are dancing in the dark, on the face of the comb, and the other bees are reading the dance by touch and by vibration, not by sight. They're following the dancer with their antennae. They're feeling the dance. The communication is tactile."

"Yes."

"And the dancer is converting a horizontal experience — flying through a landscape — into a vertical representation — dancing on a vertical comb surface. She's transposing the horizontal plane onto the vertical plane. She's doing a coordinate transformation. In the dark. On a moving surface. With a brain the size of a sesame seed."

"Yes."

"That's extraordinary."

"Yes."

The "yes" was the word Meg used when she agreed and when the agreement was sufficient and when the elaboration was unnecessary because the other person had already said the thing better than Meg could have said it, and the "yes" was the acknowledgment, the nod, the teacher's recognition that the student had not just understood the lesson but had extended it, had taken the knowledge beyond where the teacher had carried it, had seen something the teacher had not articulated, and the seeing was the confirmation that the student was becoming something beyond a student, was becoming a colleague, a peer, a person whose understanding would eventually exceed the teacher's understanding, and the exceeding was not threatening but was the point, was the purpose of teaching, was the reason the knowledge was passed on — not to create a copy of the teacher but to create a new version, a version that included the teacher's knowledge and added to it, the way each generation of bees included the genetics of the previous generation and added to them through the mating of the queen with the drones, the genetic recombination that produced variation, that produced adaptation, that produced the incremental improvement that was evolution's mechanism.

They finished lunch. They drove to the Kowalski apiary. The afternoon was warm, seventy-eight degrees, the kind of afternoon that made the bees fly hard and the beekeeper sweat in her suit and the work feel like the work it was — physical, demanding, the labor of a body that had been doing this labor for thirty years and that showed it in the hands and the shoulders and the lower back that ached at the end of the day, the occupational wear of a person whose tools were hive boxes and frames and her own musculature.

At the Kowalski apiary Meg found a colony that was dancing furiously. She pulled a frame and the entire surface was alive with dancers — four, five, six bees performing the waggle dance simultaneously, each one tracing her figure eights with the vigor that indicated a high-quality source, each one recruiting followers, each one saying: this way, this far, this good. The dances were pointing in the same direction. The colony had found something.

"They all agree," Luz said.

"They all found the same source. Or the first dancer recruited enough followers that the followers went and confirmed and came back and danced themselves and recruited more. The cascade. The exponential recruitment. One dancer becomes five becomes twenty becomes the entire foraging force directed to the same source."

"What's in that direction?"

Meg looked. She calculated the angle, transposed it from the vertical comb to the horizontal landscape, accounted for the sun's position, and pointed south-southwest, toward a section of the valley she knew — a hillside of mixed wildflowers and blackberry, a slope that faced south and caught the sun and that bloomed prolifically in July, the bloom producing nectar that the bees from this apiary had worked every summer for the fifteen years Meg had kept hives here.

"The hillside above Miller Creek. The blackberry and the wild aster and whatever else is blooming up there. They've found the mother lode."

The colony's excitement was visible. The energy in the hive was different from the energy of a colony in steady production — this was the energy of a colony that had found a bonanza, that was mobilizing, that was converting the information of the dance into the action of mass foraging, the entire colony oriented toward the source the way a compass is oriented toward north, the orientation produced not by a magnet but by the information, by the dance, by the honest, precise, unambiguous communication of one bee to another to another to another, the cascade of truth, the epidemic of direction.

Meg watched the dances and she felt what she always felt when she watched the dances, the thing that was not envy exactly but was adjacent to envy, the thing that lived in the space between admiration and longing, the admiration for the system and the longing for the system's equivalent in her own species. She wished people communicated like bees. She had said this to Luz. She had said it and the saying had been a dance, a waggle run, a transmission of information that was precise and honest and that encoded the direction and the distance and the quality of the thing she felt, and the thing she felt was the wish, the specific wish for a world in which communication was involuntary and precise and undeceivable, a world in which the gap between what you knew and what you said did not exist, a world in which the saying was the knowing and the knowing was the saying and the two were the same act.

In such a world, Gavin would have danced. In such a world, Gavin's dance would have said: the pheromone is weak, the source is depleted, I am leaving. The dance would have been precise. The dance would have encoded the direction — Bend, east, a hundred and fifty miles — and the distance — two years of increasing absence, the incremental withdrawal that had been the human equivalent of the weakening waggle, the diminishing vigor, the dance that was saying: this source is not worth the flight. And Meg would have read the dance. And Meg would have understood the dance. And the understanding would have come not from interpretation, not from the agonized parsing of what he meant and what he did not mean and what he said and what he did not say, but from the simple reading of the dance, the angle and the duration, the direction and the distance, the facts encoded in the body, the truth involuntary, the communication complete.

But people did not dance. People spoke. And speech was the opposite of the dance — speech was voluntary, speech was editable, speech was the medium in which deception lived, in which ambiguity flourished, in which a person could say "I'm fine" and mean "I am dying" and the listener had no way to decode the discrepancy because speech did not have the involuntary precision of the waggle run, speech did not convert experience into expression without the intermediary of intention, and the intermediary of intention was the space in which the lie lived, in which the evasion lived, in which all the things that Meg had not said and that Gavin had not said and that their marriage had not said lived and accumulated and eventually weighed more than the things that had been said, the unsaid being heavier than the said, the silence being denser than the speech.

Meg closed the hive. She stood in the Kowalski apiary in the July afternoon and the bees were flying hard and the dances were being danced and the information was flowing and the foragers were finding the source and the source was real and the communication was true and Meg was standing in the middle of it, in the middle of the honest system, the system that could not lie, the system that converted experience into expression without loss, without distortion, without the corruption of intention, and she was part of the system because she was the beekeeper, because the system included her the way it included the smoker and the hive tool and the frames and the wax, she was part of the apparatus, part of the structure, and the structure worked, and the working was the thing, and the thing was honest, and the honesty was the thing she wished she could carry home, could carry into the kitchen, could carry into the evening, could carry into the conversations she did not have and the phone calls she did not answer and the words she did not say.

She drove home. The sun was low. The valley was gold. The bees were finishing their last flights of the day, the foragers returning to the hives in the angled light, each one carrying nectar or pollen or both, each one having danced or having followed a dancer, each one having participated in the system of honest communication that was the colony's operating principle, the principle that said: the truth is the information and the information is the truth and the two are inseparable, and the inseparability is the strength, and the strength is the colony, and the colony survives because the communication is honest.

Meg went inside. She stood in the kitchen. She looked at the phone on the counter. Gavin had called that morning while she was in the apiary — the voicemail icon on the screen, the small red circle that indicated a message, the message she had not listened to and would not listen to tonight and might listen to tomorrow, the communication from the man who had been her partner for sixteen years and who now communicated by voicemail, by the recorded message, by the asynchronous speech that was the opposite of the waggle dance, the speech that was edited and rehearsed and voluntary and that arrived after the fact, after the decision, after the leaving, and that said whatever it said without the involuntary precision of the dance, without the guarantee of honesty, without the body's undeceivable encoding of the truth.

She left the phone on the counter. She drank her beer on the porch. She watched the hives in the evening light. The bees were inside. The dances were over. The information had been transmitted. The foragers had been recruited. The nectar had been brought in. The day's communication was complete.

Meg's communication was not complete. Meg's communication was the voicemail on the phone. Meg's communication was the words she had said to Luz — "I wish people communicated like bees" — the waggle run of a woman whose dance was as precise and as involuntary as any bee's, whose body encoded the truth as reliably as any dancer's, but whose species had the option of not dancing, of staying still, of keeping the information inside, and Meg exercised that option, had exercised it for years, had stood on the dark comb of her life and had not danced, had not said the direction or the distance or the quality of the thing she knew, and the not-dancing was the silence, and the silence was the language she spoke most fluently, and the fluency was the problem.

The evening darkened. The stars appeared. Meg went inside. She did not listen to the voicemail. She went to bed. And in the hives, in the dark, on the vertical surfaces of the comb, the bees were still, the dances paused until morning, the information stored in the neural circuits of the dancers and the followers, the knowledge of where the food was waiting for the sun to rise and the flights to resume and the dances to begin again, the honest dances, the precise dances, the dances that said what they meant and meant what they said and that could not, by the architecture of the nervous system that produced them, say anything else.