--- title: Bees: the waggle dance, the hive and honey — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Bees: the waggle dance, the hive and honey», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A beehive on a summer day is a city of about 50,000 bees, and every bee in it has a job. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Bees: the waggle dance, the hive and h… # Bees: the waggle dance, the hive and honey Lesson 239 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/0/) — A beehive on a summer day is a city of about 50,000 bees, and every bee in it has a job. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/1/) — When a worker finds good flowers, she comes home and dances a figure of eight on the comb; the dance tells her sisters which way to fly and how far. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/2/) — Bees turn flower nectar into honey to eat in winter, store it in six-sided wax cells and guard the door against robbers. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/3/) — Winnie the Pooh only wants the honey, but a real bear raiding a bee nest also eats the juicy grubs, which is the meal that really fills it up. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/4/) — The waggle dance shows the direction to the flowers by its angle from straight up, compared with the sun, so a waggle straight up means «fly towards the sun», and the distance by how long the waggle lasts. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/5/) — Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for working out the bee dance. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/6/) — A hive can have about 50,000 bees: one queen, tens of thousands of female workers and some hundreds of males called drones. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/7/) — Workers change jobs as they age: cleaning, feeding young, building wax, guarding and finally fetching food; a summer worker lives about five or six weeks. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/8/) — Bees make honey from nectar by adding enzymes and fanning it with their wings until most of the water is gone, and it feeds them in winter. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/9/) — Real bears and honey badgers raid bee nests and eat the protein-rich grubs as well as the honey. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/10/) — A honeybee's sting has barbs that stick in thick mammal skin, so the bee dies, and the left-behind sting keeps pumping venom, so scraping it out quickly helps. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/11/) — A swarm is the old queen with about half the workers looking for a new home; scouts dance for places and the swarm picks the one with most supporters; a swarm hanging on a branch is usually calm, and a beekeeper can collect it. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/12/) — The old story that science proves bumblebees cannot fly came from a wrong simple calculation; bees beat their wings very fast and make swirls of air that lift them. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/13/) — Honeycomb cells are hexagons, which hold the most honey for the least wax, and wax is costly because bees eat a lot of honey to make it. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/14/) — Many kinds of wild bee are in danger from fewer flowers, disease and some pesticides, and bees pollinate crops like apples, strawberries and almonds. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/15/) — Guard bees at the door smell each incoming bee to check it carries the hive's own smell, though a stranger bee bringing nectar is sometimes let in, as if she paid a toll. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/239-bees-the-waggle-dance-the-hive-and-honey/16/) — The queen lays the eggs but gives no orders; she lays up to about 2,000 eggs a day in summer, and any female larva fed only royal jelly can become a queen. - ← previous: [Ants: colonies, queens, farmers and living bridges](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/238-ants-colonies-queens-farmers-and-living-bridges/) - next →: [Wolves and teamwork: family packs, the alpha myth and hunting together](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/240-wolves-and-teamwork-family-packs-the-alpha-myth-and-hunting-together/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)