Video: Dance of the Honeybee Holds Key to Survival

Alison Benjamin, The Observer (UK), 5 April 2009

The "waggle dance" of honeybees is one of nature's great wonders: a sophisticated communication system that conveys distances and directions from the hive to sources of nectar. Now a British scientist is hoping to read the dance in order to reverse the honeybee's critical decline.

Francis Ratnieks, the UK's only professor of apiculture, is undertaking pioneering research using observation hives and video cameras to determine the plants and flowers that honeybees visit. In the process he hopes to learn how the countryside and urban areas can be made more bee-friendly…