I’m a fan of curiosity questions — the kinds of questions we might ask and never answer fully. These are the same the kinds of questions that take us on fun information quests.
I was biking around town yesterday when I saw a bunch of bees flying around and landing upon some wildflowers. That’s a sight I see often while exploring my town. I wondered, “Do bees remember routes?” and “If many of these wildflowers are perennials, returning each year to this very spot, do they have some way of sharing that memory across their generations — after all, they have rather short lives — so that wildflower locations don’t have to be rediscovered each year?”
I’m grateful to live in an era of Google and YouTube.
And like a good curiosity question, I haven’t yet answered this fully. But I’ve learned some neato things.
— I already knew about the waggle dance (it blows my mind that this works). Watch a video about how bees share the locations of food sources with one another.
— I also learned about bee cultures, and how they teach one another. Here’s a Wikipedia article about that.
Nature is fascinating, and it’s fun to explore these questions.
—Renee Roederer
Smuggling Grace 