DARPA should do the Waggle dance
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a governmental body which commissions scientific research for the U.S. Department of Defence, and whose stated aim is "to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military".
In President Bush's recent budget for the fiscal year 2007, DARPA is allocated $3.3 billion of funding, an increase of $316 million, or 10.6%, on the previous year.DARPA recently funded the successful development of neural implants that steer dogfish, and hope to build on the research to develop 'stealth sharks' that can track the movements of enemy vessels and transmit the information back to the control centre. Other ongoing DARPA projects include morphing materials for aircraft and a handheld 'Radar Scope' device for sensing movement through concrete walls.
One DAPRA-funded project that was not so successful was an attempt to create an army of remote-controlled cyber-insects which would detect explosives and gather and transmit information about the environment.Initially, attempts to manipulate the movements of bees and wasps were over-ridden by the insects' instinctive mating and feeding behaviours. More recently, DARPA has tried fitting pupa-stage insects with micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) which would be integrated into the nervous system of the developing insect, which some entomologists have dismissed as "ludicrous".
It is surprising that DARPA scientists are not exploiting the work of Karl von Frisch in their attempts to develop remote-controlled insects.von Frisch, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, founded ethology, the scientific study of animal behaviour, in the 1960s, and the three of them shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology for their work.
One of von Frisch's major discoveries was that honeybees have colour vision, but he is probably better known for elucidating the "waggle dance" of the honeybee. The waggle dance is a form of visual communication used by honeybees to convey to each other information about the location of food sources. von Frisch believed that he had deciphered the 'language' of the waggle dance. Ingeniously, he built a robotic bee which he used to test his theory. By making the robotic bee perform a waggle dance, he gave real honeybees false information about a source of food, which they followed.
The waggle dance is performed on a platform at the entrance to the hive. The honeybee moves in a figure of eight, with the tempo of the straight part of the dance - the waggle - conveying information about the distance to the food source. The slower the waggle, the farther away is the food, with a waggle lasting one second equating to a distance of 1km. The angle of the waggle relative to the sun provides information regarding the direction of the food.
Some scientists were, however, skeptical about von Frisch's waggle dance theory, because honeybees took longer than expected to reach the food after leaving the hive. They suggested, instead, that bees simply follow each other to the food source, or use their sense of smell to locate it.
The controversy was resolved only last year by research funded partly by the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). After observing a waggle dance and leaving the hive, honeybees were caught and had radar transponders attached to them, which enabled their movements to be tracked. This work confirmed von Frisch's theory by showing that honeybees fly directly to the vicinity of the food and then spend some time searching for the exact location. The time lag was explained by the 'search flights' carried out by the bees when they reached the vicinity of the food. 
Honeybee fitted with a radar transponder (BBSRC).
Further evidence for von Frisch's theory was obtained when bees were caught immediately after leaving their hives and moved up to 250m away. Instead of flying to the food, they flew in the direction given to them initially in the waggle dance.
Karl von Frisch is an inspiration and the epitome of a true scientist. The best scientific research is done for the love of knowledge, in the hope of divining one of nature's secrets, and von Frisch's elucidation of the waggle dance of the honeybee is a prime example of this.
Too much research is done for profit or, in the case of DARPA-funded work, with the aim of developing sophisticated weaponry.
Update
According to a study by a team of biologists at Cornell University, honey bees also use the waggle dance to communicate the sites of new nests; finding a new site involves comparing potential sites and complex group decision-making, and an understanding of how they reach a decision could improve group decision-making by humans.
We all know that Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for the “discovery and deciphering of the honeybee dance language.” Moreover, v. Frisch’s 1973 Nobel Prize was, not surprisingly, shared by Konrad Lorenz & Niko Tinbergen, the two co-founders of the misguided & misleading general approach to behavior, that is based on the belief in the existence of “instincts”, i.e. genetically predetermined behavioral responses. The erroneous belief by the 1973 Nobel Committee, that the existence of the “instinctive” honeybee “dance language” had already been adequately experimentally confirmed, provided for European Ethology the most impressive “validation” it needed.
The “discovery” of the honeybee DL never deserved a Nobel Prize, nor all the accolades given it here, for the very simple reason that this presumed DL never existed. The honeybee DL hypothesis was, instead, simply stillborn, and never could be experimentally confirmed. See my comment on “Like ecstasy for honey bees”, for more details.
The DL controversy has never been resolved in favor of DL supporters, because DL opponents adamantly refuse to accept a stillborn hypothesis. Each new claim by DL supporters to have finally obtained the required experimental confirmation of the DL hypothesis, is usually accompanied by a big fanfare in the serious, as well as popular scientific news-media, only to vanish into thin air!
And the same is true of the claim that the radar-tracking study published in Nature in 2005, has finally confirmed that honeybee-recruits indeed use DL information. Not so. And I shall briefly explain here, why. Staunch DL supporters claim , (as v. Frisch originally did), that after they leave the hive recruits use DL information, (which is not very accurate, and also differs from one recruit to another). If this does not result in the sensing of attractive odors, recruits then, search for such odors “nearby”. Once they sense such odors they can reach the source by zigzagging upwind.
However, if you read that report very carefully, you will find that many of the tracked bees did not at all behave as expected from the DL hypothesis. First you will find, that the authors, totally unnecessarily, excluded all odor & odor-contamination from their foragers’-feeder, and its source. As a result, none of the tracked bees ever found the foragers’-food, and never could be attracted by any odors from the odorless feeder with its odorless food.
The tracked bees indeed flew more or less in the direction of the feeder, and more, or less, to the distance of the feeder from the hive, (after release at the hive, and even after release at 3 other release-sites, not too far from the hive). But the flights were often conspicuously not straight. This is a problem that I shall skip.
But, even so, remember that none of the tracked bees could sense any odors from the feeder and its food. Nonetheless, if you read the report very carefully, you will also find that many of the tracked bees, are reported to have flown to about the correct distance & direction, and, then, simply turned around, and flew back to the hive. I.e., they did not search for attractive odors at all, which is contrary to what they were they were expected to do according to the DL hypothesis. The possibility that any regular recruit would use DL information, and, then, not even bother to search for attractive odors they did not find, destroys the very core of the whole DL hypothesis, which requires recruits to search for attractive odors, if they do not find such odors by use of DL information alone. Re-recruited experienced foragers, but not regular recruits, often behave like that.
In fact, all the other tracked bees also behaved as regular recruits are not expected to behave according to the DL hypothesis. But, this would be too complex to explain. So, I shall rest my case here!
Ruth Rosin
24 Feb 07 at 9:09 pm