Insect communication and behaviour
Insect communication and behaviour: bees perform a waggle dance to tell hive-mates where flowers are. Ants lay pheromone trails for others to follow. Fireflies flash light patterns to find mates. Crickets chirp by rubbing their wings. Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles across continents. How insects 'talk' without words.
What a learner can do afterwards
- Describe at least three ways insects communicate such as the bee waggle dance, ant pheromone trails, and firefly light signals
- Explain what information a bee conveys through its waggle dance, including direction and distance to flowers
- Describe the monarch butterfly migration and explain why it is remarkable in terms of distance and navigation
The lesson
Insects cannot talk with words, but they still send each other messages. They use dance, scent trails, light, and sound to share what they know.
A bee finds a patch of clover and flies home. Inside the hive, she does a waggle dance: a figure-eight move where she waggles in a straight line, then loops back around. The direction of that straight line, compared to straight up, shows the other bees which way to fly. The longer she waggles, the farther away the flowers are.
Ants send messages with scent instead of movement. As an ant walks, it leaves a pheromone trail behind it. Other ants smell the trail with their antennae and follow it straight to the food. If ants stop using a trail, the scent fades away.
Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles between Canada, the United States, and forests in central Mexico. No single monarch flies the whole round trip. It takes several generations, yet the butterflies still find the very same forests their great-great-grandparents used.
Insects share information through dance, scent, light, and sound, not through words.
Watch it
Where it sits
This opens up
Nothing builds on it yet.
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.