Sleepy bees slur their dance moves

摘要

No One works well when tired, and insects are no exception. Just like us, sleepy bees make shoddy dancers and poor communicators. Forager honeybees (Apis mellifera), like humans, normally get around eight hours of sleep a night. To find out whether a good night's sleep is important for the bees' communicative waggle dance, Barrett Klein at the University of Texas in Austin and his colleagues kept half of a group of 50 bees awake overnight. To do this, Klein stuck a small piece of either steel or non-magnetic copper onto each of the bees.