ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the intricate process of honeycomb construction.

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Ask any bee and they’ll tell you it’s none of your beeswax.

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 Here’s a passage about an experiment performed on the communication of honey bees.

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Which of the following is a prediction based on the premise that the waggle dance produces

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some type of airborne signal? Here are the potential answers…

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Looks like we’re being asked to take into account the results of the study and see what

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we can predict with that information. Classic science move.

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Knowing what we know about the waggle dance—

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namely, that it produces a smelly chemical to communicate information about food—

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which of the potential answers is a good prediction?

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Let’s start at the bottom, a very good place to start…

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Option D predicts that the chemicals produced by the waggle dance should cause the bees to mate.

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Hope not. With all that dancing and making out, nobody would ever get anything done.

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More to the point, this prediction isn’t based on anything we’ve learned

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about the waggle dance. So long, D.

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Option C predicts that the waggle dance should cause the bees to mate.

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Again, the passage says the purpose of the waggle dance has to do with

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communicating information about food.

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It’s not C.

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C’mon guys, let’s keep it classy.

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Option B predicts that all bees should produce the waggle dance chemicals.

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Nope. Whether or not all bees are capable

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of producing the chemicals isn’t a prediction based on what we’ve learned.

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Option A predicts that if air with the chemical is introduced into the hive,

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it should be the same as getting the signal from the waggle dance.

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This one certainly takes into account what we learned from the experiment,

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which is more than we can say for the other options. A it is!

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Interesting thing about bees—if a beekeeper ever shows you a hive,

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there’ll probably be a small dot of paint on the queen’s back to help keep track of her.

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Beekeepers didn’t invent that; it was originally invented to keep tabs on Queen Victoria.

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