It almost looks like an act of worship. A bee comes out of the hive, pauses for a moment in the bright morning light, and does the insect version of genuflecting in the face of its god. It doesn't cross itself; it circles itself. Circles itself, that is, around the front and back of the hive in a slanting halo perhaps ten feet in diameter. It is orienting itself, getting right with its God, its Great Mystery, its Guide, its Light and Salvation, the Sun.
Bees use the sun for a lot of things. Just like the rest of the world, bees use the sun for timekeeping in the morning and evening and for the light that reflects in through openings and cracks, making it possible to see inside the hive's darkness. And of course, they use it for heat. When the sun warms the hive enough on a cold day, bees unwrap themselves from the protective blanket of tens of thousands of their peers and get to work, the bee equivalent of waiting for the furnace to kick in before emerging from the covers.
There's another use, though, that's less universal across the animal world: navigation. Bees use the sun as their GPS in the sky, or at least their compass, religiously tracking its position to know what direction they're heading. It's one of the few things outside their hive that they have a symbolic word for in their unspoken language. When a bee does its figure eight dance inside the hive to communicate how to get to choice nectar, every other bee understands that “up” means “sun.” That is, if the target is fifteen degrees to the right of the sun, the dance will be angled fifteen degrees to the right of straight up. That's a fairly sophisticated form of symbolic language. Especially for an organism with a brain smaller than a sesame seed.
The sun's position is so important to finding the one true way, out and back, that they even have learned over the eons to anticipate its fluid nature, that it starts a pathway each day from one direction and ends it in nearly the opposite direction, and that its position changes minute by minute. Their flight paths adapt to those changes, with the bees correcting their directional orientation slightly with each passing minute.
When a bee does its
figure eight dance inside
the hive to communicate
how to get
to choice nectar, every
other bee understands
that “up” means “sun.”
