By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

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       Making a Beeline

      MENAI

      Later, as I got into my car, I looked out at the sheep, thousands of sheep, and ruminated about their accents. Five sheep for every person in the county, so they say. The face of my Gaerwen shepherd had been unmoving as he said it, no sign of a wink or a smile. Had he been joking? The notion wasn’t totally absurd. Why shouldn’t sheep have accents? If farmers can distinguish their breeds by the way they look, why not by the way they sound? I wonder if Karl von Frisch ever studied sheep?

      Probably not. Bees were his thing. And fish. But mainly bees. I still have the copy of a Scientific American article he wrote in 1962: ‘Dialects in the Language of the Bees’. It led me to his book, written a few years before, translated into English as The Dancing Bees. Von Frisch was director of the Zoological Institute at Munich University, and in the 1920s he began a lifelong series of experiments into the way bees communicate with each other. It got him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology/Medicine.

      Observers of nature know that when a single forager bee finds a good source of nectar, within an hour or so dozens, maybe hundreds, of bees will have found their way to the place. Evidently, the pioneer bee has returned to the hive and ‘told’ the others about the location of the food. But how? Von Frisch and his colleagues discovered that the information was being conveyed through a pattern of repeated body movements which he called ‘dancing’.

      It was taking a while to get out of the sheep-market car park. I had to negotiate my way through a slow reversing dance of Range Rovers and sheep trailers, as they manoeuvred to offload their noisy contents into the sheep pens. A bee floated indecisively across my windscreen, plainly not on a von Frisch mission.

      How had he worked it out? The researchers’ method was to put a small dish of sugar water some distance from the hive. The dish might not be discovered for several days, but as soon as one bee found it, and returned to the hive, others soon emerged and made their way to exactly the place where the dish was. It seemed to be precision navigating.

      The first time I read about this research, I remember thinking: how on earth could you keep track of a single bee within a hive? But there was a simple solution. The researchers marked the pioneer forager with a coloured dot while it was feeding, so that they could track its movements when it returned. The hive had glass walls so that they could see what was happening inside. And there they saw the dance – a ‘round’ dance, with the bee turning in circles alternately to the left and the right.

      The behaviour has now been observed by hundreds of researchers. It’s been filmed, and – these days – computer-analysed. The dance is evidently saying, ‘Hey, everyone, come and see what I’ve found, not far away!’ If the nectar source is especially rich, the dance language is especially lively. ‘Hey, you really have to see this!’

      I finally got out of the sheep-market, and followed the little back road around to the junction with the A5 at the edge of Gaerwen, near where the Lit – tle Chef used to be. It’s a quiet road now. The new dual-carriageway A55 across Anglesey took most of the traffic away, and the café went with it. But there are enough points of interest along the A5 to keep the tourists coming. Llanfairpwll is just a couple of miles away, on the edge of the Menai Straits that separate Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. I always have a linguistic compulsion to avoid the bypass and drive along its main street, just to take in the long name outside the railway station.

      Things have changed in Llanfairpwll. During the later decades of the last century you would see navy cadets (of both sexes) walking around the village. They were from the Royal Navy shore-based training school on the edge of the Menai Straits. The name of the school, inherited from a famous training vessel of the past, was on the front of their caps. It said simply Indefatigable. The school closed in 1995, and with it went an era of risqué jokes.

      These days Llanfairpwll has another magnet as well as the name: Pringle’s knitwear store – though its racks of souvenir mugs, books, and teatowels have added fresh nuances to the definition of ‘knitting’. Several tourist buses were lined up outside, and their contents were dancing to and fro at the entrance, excitedly pointing out things in the shop to one another. ‘Hey, you really have to see this!’

      A busload of Japanese tourists was posing for a photograph in front of the long name on the shop and trying to pronounce it. The one at the railway station has a pseudo-phonetic transcription underneath it, which I suppose helps.

      One of the buses was having some difficulty negotiating the turn into the car park, so a small traffic jam built up. While I waited for it to clear, I looked across at the buzzing forecourt. Just inside the door of the shop there is one of those signposts which gives distances and directions to major cities. It tells you that it is 6,879 miles to Buenos Aires that way (past Aberystwyth and keep going) and 5,923 miles to Tokyo this way (via Benllech). It is also 9,898 miles from Llanfairpwll to the South Pole.

      I expect when the tourists get back home they will tell their friends about where they have been, and more will come.

      That seems to be what happened to von Frisch’s bees. When the forager did its round dance, the nearby bees got the message, detected the scent of the kind of flower on the forager’s body, and flew off to look for it. When they found it, they too returned to the hive and did a similar dance. And so it went on, with more and more bees making the visit, until most of the nectar had been drained from the source. Late arrivals at the flower then found little to feed on, so when they returned to the hive they had, quite literally, nothing to make a buzz and dance about. Their dancing movements were slow or they stopped altogether. ‘Don’t bother going!’ And the other bees, noting the inactivity, stayed put – until the next excited forager arrived with news of a fresh source of nectar.

      There was no danger of the Pringle’s source being totally drained. Indeed, as I waited for the traffic to clear, I could see a delivery van unloading fresh supplies. Nectar yesterday, nectar tomorrow, and always nectar today.

      The round dance is enough to indicate the source if it’s fairly near to the hive – von Frisch thought within about 275 feet or so – but if it’s a lot further away, such as a mile or more, something more precise is needed. That’s when the bees do the ‘tail-wagging’ dance. Inside the hive, the forager runs a short distance in a straight line, wagging its abdomen from side to side, then returns in a semi-circle to the starting point. It repeats the run, and comes back in a semi-circle on the opposite side. Then it does СКАЧАТЬ