2015

Digital Artwork, Flipbook

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The honey bee moves; dancing, buzzing, waggling, and communicating. It travels in a figure eight pattern as the others begin to watch. The dance becomes more exuberant; the nectar must be close.

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The waggle dance, also known as the tail-wagging dance with an intermediary form called the sickle dance, is a social behavior performed by honey bees (von Frisch).  Food sources that are more than a hundred metres away require the bee to engage in a waggle dance while sources between twenty-five and one-hundred metres require the use of the round dance (von Frisch). After searching for food sources, a scout bee returns to the hive with nectar where it regurgitates and circulates this new sustenance and apprises the foragers of the new location through dance (von Frisch).

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The dance acts as a form of non-verbal interaction that communicates the amount of energy needed by the bee to travel to the food source location. For instance, three circuits of the waggle dance in fifteen seconds means the food source is two-thousand metres away (von Frisch). The dance also communicates the direction of the food source through the direction the honey bee faces when dancing in the middle of the figure-eight where it waggles. For example, if the bee is facing straight-upward the food source is in the same direction as the sun (von Frisch).

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For this project, I created a flipbook using designs I created in Adobe Illustrator to demonstrate the animating quality of movement and dance in the waggle dance of the honey bee. Dancing is lively and rhythmical movement; it can be an expression of emotions and in this case, a form of communication. The liveliness of the honey bee’s dance is defined by the quality and quantity of the new nectar; the higher the quality the longer and more spirited the dancing (von Frisch). Similarly, the National Ballet of Canada’s Winter’s Tale demonstrates emotions through its dancers such as the character of Leontes who acts out his envy and jealousy through stiff and haunting movements.

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The flipbook’s waggle dance mimics the honey bees movement as the loop is made three times to determine the distance to the food source and the straight portion of the dance is facing upwards meaning the food source is in the direction of the sun. I used a template image of the figure eight waggle dance to determine the exact formation of the dance within the flipbook (see image 1). The background is of a hive as the scout would be returning to their hive to perform the waggle dance for the foragers. The colours of the background are bright to add to the lively quality. I created four different honey bee outlines which are alternated to create dynamism in the movement of the bee (see image 2). As the bee is moving faster through the central part of the dance, I made the movement closer together and slightly closed the wings.

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A danger facing humanity is the potential extinction of the honeybee population because of human caused environmental factors. This will bear an effect on the future growth of fruits, vegetables and other plants which require pollination to reproduce (Hagopian). Inspired by the intelligence of honey bees and as a reaction to this potential disaster, a Harvard research project has created autonomous small flying robots (see image 3). Though they cannot as of now make honey, Robobees have practical uses such as “pollinating, search and rescue, hazardous environment exploration, military surveillance, high resolution weather and climate mapping, [and] traffic monitoring” (Harvard University). The flipbook commemorates a species that is dying as a result of humanity's actions and its waggle dance acts as a symbol of hope for the future of these species.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Harvard University, Robobees, accessed November 10, 2015, robobees.seas.harvard.edu

 

Joachim Hagopian, “Death and Extinction of the Bees,” Global Research: Centre for Research on Globalization, November 1, 2015. http://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684

 

Karl Von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, MA, US: Harvard University Press, 1967)

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