If you listen to a hive of bees, what you’ll hear is a droning, humming buzz. Sometimes it gets so loud that you might wonder how the bees hear each other at all. Well, the truth is: they don’t. Bees don’t need to hear each other, because they don’t talk to each other using sounds. Bees talk to each other by making smells, and by dancing!

In school science, you might learn that a hive contains a queen bee and thousands of worker bees. The big queen is surrounded by her “court” of about twelve bees. The queen’s court feeds her and cleans her, but if you look closely, you can also see them brushing their antennae against the queen’s body over and over again. They’re doing this because a queen produces something called pheromones, which are smelly chemicals, and different pheromones tell the bees in the hive to do different things. A worker bee in the queen’s court picks up the pheromones from the queen, and then uses her antennae to spread that smell around the hive.

Soldier bees make some important smells, too. Soldiers are older worker bees who guard the entrance to the hive from any insects or other animals who might threaten the hive or the babies inside. If a soldier senses danger, she releases a “warning” pheromone that tells all the other bees to come help with their stingers ready. School science teaches us to leave bees alone, and with good reason; if you swat at a bee and she releases that warning smell, you might have a whole hive of angry bees to deal with instead!

Even dead bees can communicate with the hive. When a bee dies, she releases a “dead bee” pheromone. This is important because a hive is crammed full of thousands of bees, and they have to keep it tidy and clean so that the bees in the hive don’t get sick. So as soon as a worker picks up that “dead bee” smell on her antennae, the smell guides her to the bee so she can pick it up in her jaws and carry it out of the hive.

But smells aren’t the only ways bees talk to each other; they also like to dance!

Bees need lots of nectar and pollen, so when a bee finds some, she needs to tell the other bees where to find it. She does this using something called the “waggle dance”. She stands facing in one direction and waggles her abdomen back and forth; each waggle represents a certain distance. Then she turns in a figure-eight and waggles again. She repeats this dance over and over, and the other workers watch her carefully. What’s she’s doing is giving them a complicated set of directions: she’s saying “when you leave the hive, turn this way and go this far, then you turn this way and go this far.”

But although the waggle dance is the most famous, there are many other dances that bees use to talk to each other. The “round dance” is a circular dance that says “hey, there’s food near the hive!”, a “vibrating dance” that tell lazy workers “hey, get up and do something!”, and even a shaky, staggering dance tells other bees “somebody please clean me!”

Bee talk is some real science fun. Imagine if you had to get your ideas across using only smells and dances. People might start to avoid you if you got really smelly, but what kind of dances would you do do to say “I’m hungry,” or “I don’t want to go to bed right now.” Maybe the next time you have trouble thinking of the right thing to say, you should just make like a bee and dance it out instead!

Post by Sarah

Hey kids, close your eyes for a moment and imagine that your arms are stuck to your sides and your legs are stuck together. Imagine that you have no ears, and that you smell with your tongue. And imagine that your entire body is covered with fingernails.

Seems strange, doesn’t it? Now you know what it’s like being a snake!

Snakes are a group of reptiles closely related to lizards. Most people think that the big difference between them is that lizards have legs and snakes don’t, but there are some legless lizards, and some snakes that have little “claws” near their tails which are actually the remnants of hind legs!

Actually, the biggest differences between snakes and lizards are the ears, eyes, and scales.

Snakes don’t have eyelids like lizards do. Instead, their eyes are covered by a clear, hard scale. If something gets in a snake’s eye, the snake licks its eyes clean using its tongue!

Snakes also don’t have ear openings on their heads at all! Instead, snakes hear though vibrations that travel though the air and the ground. So if you want to frighten away any snakes, all you need to to is stamp very hard as you walk.

Snakes don’t use legs to get around, either. They move by slithering with their bodies, and using their scales to help hold them in place.  Snake scales cover their entire bodies, and the widest scales are on their bellies. Their scales sit in your skin just like fingernails do, and help to grip the ground as a snake moves.

Because they are also hard, like your fingernails, scales don’t stretch as a snake grows. That’s why snakes have to shed their scales as they grow. They crawl out of the old, too-small skin, and leave it behind like a long sock!

Fun fact #1: Biggest Snake: You can divide snakes up into two groups: those who catch their prey by biting them with poisonous fangs, and those who catch their prey by squeezing. The biggest snakes are the squeezers, or constrictors. The title for biggest snake is shared between two species: anacondas and pythons. Anacondas are the heaviest snakes, and can weigh up to 550 pounds. Reticulated pythons are the longest; they can reach up to 10 metres (33 feet) long. That’s like laying eight 10-year-olds end-to-end!

Fun Fact #2: Most Poisonous Snake:  The Taipan is a snake that lives in Australia, and its venom will clot your blood, turning it into a thick soup, and destroy all your organs. It also doesn’t need a lot of venom to do that.  Terry Phillip, a curator at Reptile Gardens, says: “1 milligram of the venom is equal to 1 M&M candy cut into 1,000 equal pieces and [one of those pieces] is how much it takes to kill one adult human being.” That is one deadly snake!

Fun Fact #3: Greatest Actor: The hognose snake is a burrowing snake that is harmless to humans, but if anything threatens it, it will flatten out its head, rear up, and hiss, just like a cobra! Better yet, if that doesn’t work to scare off the threat, the hognose will roll over on its back and play dead with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Even if you flip it over onto its belly, it will just roll on to its back again!

Post by Sarah