TOEFL Reading Practice

READING Passage 3

The Dance of the Honeybee

1 Body language can be as simple as a raised eyebrow or more laden with meaning than the spoken word—and it is not limited to humans. From lizards doing push-ups to squirrels twitching their tails, creatures throughout the animal kingdom have fine-tuned the art of information exchange. One of the most remarkable and elaborate forms of communication is the waggle dance of the honeybee. This insect version of the hokey pokey not only communicates that a first-rate food supply is at hand, it also details how far away and in what direction the food is located, using the sun as a reference point.

2 Honeybees live in colonies of about 50,000 to 60,000 bees. Each hive has a single queen, a few hundred male drones, and many thousands of sterile female workers. The queen and drones have a straightforward job description: Reproduce. The workers do everything else—feed the queen, drones, and developing larvae, clean and ventilate the hive; build the wax combs to house the queen’s eggs and to store food; collect nectar and pollen and process them into honey; and protect the home territory from invaders. Keeping the hive running efficiently and the residents healthy is a monumental job, not unlike running a small city. A well-organized system with a dear-cut division of labor and reliable lines of communication is a must.

3 When a honeybee scout spies an interesting patch of flowering vegetation, such as a field of sweet clover, she first samples it, sucking out nectar with her tongue and packing bits of pollen into tiny pouches on her hind legs. Then she heads home to tell her sisters. She will need their help carrying her loot back to the hive.

4 Inside the hive, a vertical comb doubles as a dance floor. If the clover is nearby— within a hundred yards or so—the scout delivers a quick, nonspecific message. She gyrates in a tight circle in a jig dubbed the “round dance” that tells her sisters food is close by. The dance prompts them to go out and forage, but they will use their own senses of smell and sight to find the food.

5 The waggle dance comes into play when the food source is farther away. The scout struts along the comb in a straight line waggling her abdomen, shaking her tail, and beating her wings to make buzzing noises. She stops and loops in a semicircle back to the starting point, waggles down the same path, and then circles back again in the opposite direction, outlining a wide figure eight in the process. Her sisters watch and decipher: the length of her straight line tells them the distance to the clover, and her orientation on the comb tells them the direction relative to the sun. A downward path means the clover lies directly away from the sun, straight up means it is directly toward the sun, and al) other directions specify the angle between the hive and the sun; for example, a horizontal path on the comb means it is at a 90° angle to the sun.

6 People had long been aware of the waggle dance but not its meaning—not until some 60 years ago when an Austrian zoologist named Karl von Frisch proposed that the dance was a coded message to lead hive mates to food. In 1973, he won a Nobel Prize for his work. His theory met with widespread acceptance from the start, although a few naysayers doubted the existence of such a complicated process in insects and believed individual bees simply followed the scout toward the food, and used their own senses of sight and smell to find it once they got close. A study in 2005 confirmed von Frisch’s theory, with scientists putting tracking devices on bees and then following them as they made a direct path from the hive to the vicinity of the food. From that point, the bees searched around until they located the food on their own.

7 Today, most scientists agree that worker bees use the distance and direction information in their dances to locate food, but they generally agree that smell also plays an important role. While the scout dances, she flings pollen into the air, and waggle watchers get a good whiff of the scent of flowers. It may help them recognize the scout’s distant clover field, or it may simply stimulate their appetite. Although they probably observe the whole dance, they do not all follow the dancer’s directions. Some forego the long trek to the clover field and simply head to their favorite flower garden instead.