Skip to main content
Interactive Mathematics
Search IntMath
Close

Dancing Honeybee Using Vector Calculus to Communicate

By Murray Bourne, 04 Jan 2008

This week's movie shows how honeybees communicate the distance and direction of a food source to their nestmates.

Actually, this involves "vectors" more than "calculus", but it's kind of cool how it works.

There's an issue with gender in this movie. Forager bees are females, not males.

See the 3 Comments below.

Related posts:

  1. The IntMath Newsletter - Mar 2007 In this newsletter: 1. This month’s math tips 2. Pi Day 3. What’s new 4....
  2. IntMath Newsletter: Wu’s squaring trick, PatrickJMT, Google calculus In this Newsletter: 1. Wu's squaring trick 2. Resource - PatrickJMT math videos 3. Google...
  3. IntMath Newsletter: DUI, math dancing and printing a kidney In this Newsletter: 1. Events this month 2. Human error causes problems in drink-driving cases...
  4. Wall of calculus, from Blinkx Blinkx searches through the audio track of videos to give you a more relevant result....
  5. Friday math movie: U + Me = Us (calculus) Here's a fun video from boy band 2gether with mathematical mentions....

Posted in Math movies category - 04 Jan 2008 [Permalink]

3 Comments on “Dancing Honeybee Using Vector Calculus to Communicate”

  1. Steven says:
    6 Jan 2008 at 11:28 am [Comment permalink]

    It's a shame they don't explain better about how the distance to the flowers is communicated.

    But it was an interesting movie.

  2. Darmok says:
    20 Jan 2008 at 6:51 am [Comment permalink]

    That's remarkable!

  3. Jack Gonciarczyk says:
    18 Oct 2011 at 11:58 pm [Comment permalink]

    wow! that was very fun to watch!

Leave a comment




Comment Preview

HTML: You can use simple tags like <b>, <a href="...">, etc.

To enter math, you can can either:

  1. Use simple calculator-like input in the following format (surround your math in backticks, or qq on tablet or phone):
    `a^2 = sqrt(b^2 + c^2)`
    (See more on ASCIIMath syntax); or
  2. Use simple LaTeX in the following format. Surround your math with \( and \).
    \( \int g dx = \sqrt{\frac{a}{b}} \)
    (This is standard simple LaTeX.)

NOTE: You can mix both types of math entry in your comment.

top

Tips, tricks, lessons, and tutoring to help reduce test anxiety and move to the top of the class.