Bees have always fascinated curious folk. We have tended them for a few thousand years but although apiculture developed through the centuries, it was largely in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of bee behaviour. One of the difficulties is that bees don't like light in their homes. If they see it they stop what they're doing and try to make everything dark again by plugging the holes with propolis or wax, or they'll go on the attack. Their undisturbed behaviour is therefore very difficult to observe.
In the 19th century, François Huber set out to overcome this. According to Jason Roberts, Huber arranged for a hive to be built in two hinged halves, each sealed with a glass front. Bees in their dark homes were a strangely apt subject for study by Huber, as he was a completely blind man. He had an assistant open the hive for a few seconds and fastidiously relate what the bees were doing until they reacted to the light.* In this way, Huber collected detailed information about how bees work, and his book, New Observations on the Natural History of Bees, laid the foundation for our modern understanding of this complex social creature.
Although as always there's a lot we haven't a clue about, during the latter half of the 20th Century we learnt a lot more about how bees relate to each other. The next major breakthrough came in the 1960s with the work of Karl von Frisch, who discovered that bees had sophisticated means of communication. When foragers find a food source they return to the hive to tell their sisters about it through a dance. By shaking their abdomens with a certain amount of vigour in a certain direction while walking a certain distance, forager bees can communicate the precise quality, bearing and distance from the hive of a new food source. Pretty amazing. Have a look at this:
* = Jason Roberts, 'A Sense of the World'
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