In spite of the fact that we understand that bees do not hear sounds as we do, with our ears, we humans prefer to think of the bees as making sounds rather than vibrations, or oscillations. We may even talk about the buzz of the bees in flight as somehow communicating with us: 'Busy bee, buzz all you like, but don't sting me!'Beekeepers can in fact learn from the audible hum of a hive quite a lot about the colony within. For example, in his useful little book At the Hive Entrance, Professor Storch begins by suggesting the beekeeper should listen to the hive in winter when itwould be inadvisable to open it up: "On a quiet day, listen at the entrance of a well-populated hive which has no intermediate bottom board. Most people will not hear anything at all; but a well trained ear will distinguish a soft buzz, similar to a lightly uttered 'shh'.... If one listens at the hive entrance on a day when the temperature has sharply increased or decreased, one can hear a buzz resembling an evening breeze in a forest." And I am sure that every beekeeper is well tuned to hear the changein the pitch of the buzz when a bee decides to drive off an enemy from the hive. In this case, we may well be right to imagine that the bee is communicating with our ears on purpose; even though she cannot 'hear' the sound, she is accelerating like madto send us scurrying away.However, rather than worrying about the sounds bees make outside the hive, recent research has been examining the various sounds (or rather, vibrations) which bees make inside the hive itself to communicate socially. The 'piping' of the queens about to hatch is well known, and you can hear it on the internet, if you haven't heard it in your own hives.
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