From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The African Honey Bee (Apis mellifera scutellata) maintains a colony of up to eighty thousand individuals and communicates the location of food sources through the waggle dance — a figure-eight movement that encodes direction relative to the sun, distance in the duration of the waggle run, and the quality of the source in the vigour of the performance. This is language. Not metaphorical language — functional language, encoding specific directional, quantitative, and evaluative information that other individuals act on. The author has been eating the honey this system produces without investigating the system. He considers this a significant omission, and the omission considerably longer than it should have been.”

He had been eating the honey since the second camp.

Local honey, from the general store. He had not thought extensively about what had produced it because honey had been produced for him since childhood and the production was understood as the business of bees.

He was now reading about the waggle dance.

The returning forager entered the hive and performed the figure-eight. The angle of the straight run relative to vertical encoded the direction of the food source relative to the sun. The duration of the waggle run encoded the distance. The vigour of the performance encoded the quality of the source: better food, more vigorous dance, more recruits responding.

Other bees watched. Other bees calculated. Other bees flew in the correct direction at the correct distance and found the food.

Not instinct in the sense of undirected behaviour. Directed flight, based on information received, toward a location described in a medium the author had been eating without thinking about for two volumes.

He went to find a hive.

The camp's resident colony was in a hollow camelthorn forty metres from the water point — he had noted it on the first day and filed it as bee colony, do not disturb, relevance: limited. He stood at a respectful distance and watched the entrance. Foragers arriving, foragers departing. He had watched this kind of traffic at hives before without studying it. He was studying it now.

A returning forager arrived and went inside. Four seconds later, a small cluster of other bees left the entrance and flew — he tracked them with his glasses — southwest. Directly southwest, not approximately. A line of flight with a specific bearing.

He looked southwest. He could not see what was there. Flowers of some kind, at some distance, of sufficient quality to recruit. The forager inside the hive had told them. They had gone.

"It works," he said, to no one in particular.

"Yes," Cetshwayo said, from behind him. "It always works."

“Yes. Where the flowers are. How far. How good.”

“In a dance.”

“Yes.”