The Book of Animal Ignorance Read Online Free PDF Page A

communication other than human language is the work not of an ape but an insect. Honeybees can tell one another the quality, distance and precise location of a food source by a complex sequence of movements and vibrations called the ‘waggle dance’. And, unlike most of the dolphin or primate ‘languages’, we can actually understand what the bees are saying to each other (each waggle, for example, represents about 150 feet from the hive). The discovery of this in 1945 was enough to earn Karl von Frisch the only Nobel Prize ever awarded for the study of animal behaviour.
    More recent research has filled out the picture. Bees have a sense of time; being able to see in the ultraviolet range makes them more attracted to some flower colours and textures than others; they can learn by experience. They can even recognise human faces. Given that many humans struggle with this once they’ve turned forty, it seems utterly remarkable in creatures whose brain is the size of a pinhead. Yet bees who are rewarded with nectar when shown some photos of faces, and not when shown others, quickly learn to tell the difference. Not that we should read too much into this. Bees don’t ‘think’ in a meaningful way. There’s no small talk; they only ever communicate on two subjects: food and where they should set up the next hive. The ‘faces’ in the experiment were clearly functioning as rather odd-looking flowers, not as people they wanted to get to know socially. Equally, a single bee, however smart, is severely limited in its appeal as a pet, when separated from its hive.
    It’s not hard to see why bees were sacred to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians. Not only is the hive the epitome of a well-ordered society, it is also full of drama. A new queen, as soon as she’s murdered all her sisters, takes her ‘nuptial flight’, in which she mates in mid-air with up to fifteen drones. All thedrones die (their penises explode with an audible pop, leaving the end inside her as a rather ineffective plug) and the queen returns with enough sperm on board to stock the entire colony on her own. A queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs each day during her three-year lifetime. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees. Very occasionally the chemical balance wobbles and female workers start to lay as well, but rebellions are put down ruthlessly and all the impostors’ eggs are immediately eaten by fellow workers.
    Honeybees did not evolve in the New World: English colonists introduced them. Native Americans called them ‘white man’s flies’ .
    The species Apis mellifera also provides us with the only edible secretion, other than milk, that we can take from an animal without injury. Properly sealed and stored, honey is the one food that does not spoil. Archaeologists have tasted and found edible 3,000-year-old honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs. Honey is ‘hygroscopic’, meaning it can absorb and hold moisture so that any moulds and bacteria that touch it quickly lose their own moisture and die. But honey represents only a fiftieth of the true economic importance of bees. In the US alone, bees pollinate crops worth $19 billion each year. Without them there would be no agriculture: every third mouthful of food we owe to the bee.
    AT THE COMBFACE

Beetle
    The insect’s insect
    I f diversity and adaptability are the measuring stick for success, then beetles are the most successful animals on the planet. There are 350,000 known species, with up to eight million more out there waiting for names: new species are being discovered at an average rate of one an hour. If you lined up all animal and plant species in a row, every fifth species would be a beetle. There are about 750,000,000,000,000,000 individual beetles going about their business right now.
    Beetles are not aristocratic, vain esoterics, like butterflies and moths, or communists, like ants and bees.