Honey Bee Dance Game - Introduction Video

Welcome to the Way of the Waggle Dance. This game teaches you how honeybees communicate with their sister bees when they want to show them where to find some of the best flowers near the honeybee hive or nest. Now, you may not know it, but honeybees use dance to communicate, and that's what this game is all about. In fact, if you get really good at this game, you should be able to understand a honeybee when she uses the dance to communicate where to find the best flowers, kind of like being a Dr. Dolittle with bees. So, let's go into the introduction to learn a little bit about honeybees. The first thing to learn is that honeybees work as a team, and they're always out looking for the best flowers. We're going to talk about what makes a good flower for honeybees later, but right now we're going to talk more about how they communicate. So, that's the dance we mentioned. This is called the waggle dance, and the waggle dance has two parts to it. One is the waggle run, and the other is the circle back where the bee comes back to start the waggle run again. You'll see it when you start to play the game, but the whole dance kind of forms a figure eight. So, what should you look for in the dance? One is if you have a long waggle run, the flower will be farther away. Okay, so let's talk about direction. We know how sister bees tell each other how far flowers are from the hive, but there is more that we need to know. What direction should we fly? That's the next question. So, bees are always giving information to their sister bees by telling them where in relationship to the sun the flower is located. So, here's an example. The sun is at 12 o'clock in this circle on the left, and our sister bee is showing us that we need to the right of the sun at 90 degrees. So, if we go over here, we look at the sun, then that means we would have to fly at 90 degrees from the sun to get to that part of the flower. All right, well, we know the sun isn't always in the same place. So, at first we had the sun straight up at 12 o'clock, then we know which direction we're going. But what if the sun is at three o'clock, like over here? If it's at three o'clock, then we're going to be actually flying in relationship to the screen here. We're flying down, and you can see that if the sun is at six o'clock, then we know we're going to be flying, in this case, to the left. Now, the other dance that we can come across is called the round dance. The round dance is used when the flower is actually close to the hive. And so, this one basically tells them there's a good flower close by. And some scientists think that the bees also use their waggle in this dance to tell the other bees what the quality of the flower is like. All right, so let's talk about flower quality. There are two things we're looking for, nectar and pollen. The more a flower has of those two things, the better it is. All right, so we're looking for nectar and pollen. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is we're looking at this as humans would see flowers, and humans see the world differently than bees. And I'm going to show you, you can actually switch the vision mode so you can see flowers in bee vision versus how you and I might see the flower. All right, so let's learn how to play. So here we are. Let's scroll down to the game board. The game board is going to be the location where the hive is, and there will be flowers. And over here, there's actually a wasp. And that's something you'll see in the advanced game mode. By the way, we're trying to stay away from wasps. And then on the left, there's an inspect section, and there's more info. The other thing is, once we're inside the hive, one of the things we're going to be looking for is the quality and the quantity of the nectar that's in the flower. And scent information is another thing that helps the bees. And they get that information from, well, the rear end of their sister bees. Matching the scent tells them that, yes, you're the right flower. So honeybees are good at remembering scents. And let's scroll down. If we need to move, we're going to take the mouse, and we can just click on an area that we need to go to, or tap on your screen if you're using a mobile device. And that will allow you to move the bee to that location. Now we're going to be inspecting things. Remember, we're going to be looking for the quality and the quantity of a particular flower's nectar and pollen. So let's go look inside what you're going to be able to view. So one of the things you'll be able to tell is, okay, how much nectar is there, and how much pollen is there. And then remember, the scent is an indicator that you're at the right flower. And then I also mentioned that you can change from normal vision to bee vision. Now if you end up forgetting the information that your sister bee gave you, you can return to the hive. It'll ask you if you want to go inside, and you can say yes. You go in, and you'll see the dance again, and the flower information. Keep in mind that when you're playing the advanced level, that you will lose points if you do that. So try to remember the information your sister bee gave you. And then as I mentioned before, you want to stay away from the wasps. That would like to eat you. So the final thing in this section is the game score. And I'm going to let you review that on your own, because there are a lot of details there. So right now, let's go play. And as I said, I'm going to start on the beginner mode. And here we are. We're inside the hive, and we have a waggle dance going on. And you can see the long run to the left. Remember, the sun is always at the top at 12 o'clock in the beginner mode. Let me show you the guide. Solid line here is showing you the direction of the sun, and the dotted line is showing you the waggle dance. And we can see that there's a nectar of 15 percent and a scent of 51 percent. So this dance shows you you need to fly at a 90 degree angle from the sun to the left of the sun. You can kind of think of it that way. The other way would be 270 degrees. So let's go find the flower. So here we are. There's the sun. And we have to go this direction. So let's go all the way out here. Let's try this. Inspect it. There is the pollen. Remember I said you can change to bee vision. So instead of looking at purple flowers, the honeybees are seeing them. Actually, it's green. Interesting. So I think we should inspect. And we got it right. So let's go do a few more levels. All right. What do we have here? It looks like, to me, instead of a waggle dance, it looks like the round dance. So let's turn on the guide. And sure enough, you can see that the dotted line is a circle. So the flower is close by. We're looking for 40 percent nectar. And it's got a scent level of 51 percent. Let's try this first spot. That's the right one. And that's normal vision. And it is an orange flower. What does the bee see? Oh, interesting. So let's inspect that. Yes. Let's go to another level. All right. Now we have another waggle dance. I'll show you the guides again. The solid line is the sun. And you can see the dotted line with the waggle dance. She's flying away from the sun. And we're looking for 89 percent nectar. And it's not a very long run. So the flower must be close by. So let's go find it. Let's go down here and inspect. No, that's not it. So here. Yes. There we go. Great. So we've done three levels and there are four levels that are in the beginner mode. So let's do one more. And oh, we're going in the same direction, but we're going much farther. And the nectar is 28 percent and the scent is 35 percent. OK, let's go find the flower. And by the way, if you go here and I click on this and I'm in normal vision, that's fine. If I said this flower was it. Watch what happens. Oops. Wrong. Right. I knew that, but I wanted to show you. So I'm going to continue. Let's go fly down here and we're going to click to inspect. Ah, that looks better. Nectar 28 percent and scent 35 percent. Success. Now I can print the score. Keep in mind that in the beginner mode, we're not really keeping any score. So what it will do is tell you how many flowers you inspected, how many you got incorrect, and then what happened when you returned. And I can print this. I'm just going to cancel out for now. So we can at this point go back. We can continue to play again. We could do the advanced mode, but we're not going to do that in this video. I'll let you have fun in that mode yourself. For now, I'm going to go to the menu and I want you to see that we have another thing you can do, and that's to go visit Bee Bonanza. And in Bee Bonanza, you get the story about honeybees, and it's quite a story in itself. You can actually explore what it would be like to be a honeybee using virtual reality and go You can learn about the anatomy of honeybees, colony life, bee communication, which is the waggle dance, bee identification. That's where you get to test your bee ID skills because there are insects that look like honeybees, but they're not. You can also learn about the honey these bees make. We also have a great section on how bees fly and also why some honeybees are disappearing. For right now, let's go back to the waggle dance because I know you will want to test your skills and try out the advanced mode. Just remember, when you're in the advanced mode, watch out for those wasps and have fun.