Bee Science with Dewey Caron - Listening to the Bees

Do you listen to your bees? Beekeepers rely heavily on sight when inspecting a colony, along with touch and even smell. But in this installment of Bee Science with Dr. Dewey Caron, Dewey asks us to consider another source of information—the remarkable world of sound and vibration produced by honey bees.

Honey bees live in an acoustic world that extends well beyond the familiar buzz we hear around a colony. Dewey explores how bees produce sound through their flight muscles and how they perceive airborne vibrations through their antennae and substrate-borne vibrations through their legs. He also explains why a queenless colony can sound noticeably different from a queenright colony and how experienced beekeepers can sometimes recognize changes within a colony simply by listening.

Dewey then returns to the waggle dance, exploring research showing that sound and vibration are important components of honey bee communication. Recruits aren't simply following a dancer—they are receiving vibroacoustic information that helps communicate the distance to a food source.

The science gets even more fascinating as Dewey examines stop signals, predator warnings, learning among young dancers, and acoustic communication in other honey bee species.

Finally, Dewey traces the history of using colony sounds to understand bee behavior, from Eddie Woods' pioneering Apidictor in the 1950s to today's digital sensors, sophisticated microphones, and machine-learning systems designed to interpret what's happening inside a colony without unnecessarily opening the hive.

The next time you're working your bees, don't just look. Listen. Your colony may be telling you more than you realize.

This is Part One of Dewey's exploration of sound in honey bees. In Part Two, he'll return to some of the specialized sounds associated with swarming and communication.

Notes and references:

• Mea McNeil https://americanbeejournal.com/sounds-of-the-hive-part-1/
• Towne W.F., Kirchner, W,H. 1989. Hearing in honey bees: detection of air-particle oscillations. Science. 12;244(4905):686-8. doi: 10.1126/science.244.4905.686. PMID: 17740340.
• Mario Vallejo-Marín. 2018. Buzz pollination: studying bee vibrations on flowers. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.15666
• Claudi Roller. 2025. Honey Bee Sensory Superpowers: Hearing. https://www.buddhabeeapiary.com/blog/honey-bee-sound
• Ferrari, S., Silva, M., Guarino, M., Berckmans, D. 2008. Monitoring of swarming sounds in bee hives for early detection of the swarming period. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 64(1), 72–77
• Arnia Discussion: https://forum.honeyflow.com/t/want-to-spy-on-your-bees-the-arnia-is-coming-the-arnia-is-coming/7669

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