Bee Communicator 2

See the first version [link] for background info, if you are unfamiliar with how bees communicate the locations of nectary flowers to each other. That idea proposed to simulate a bee performing a waggle dance using a fake bee on a stick, actuated by a motor and some sort of mechanism.

In this idea, I propose instead to use some kind of screen, such as an LCD or OLED screen, inside the beehive, displaying a generated moving image of a bee performing a waggle dance. This minimizes moving parts and should reduce cost somewhat, because such screens are already mass-produced. It also increases adaptability; the image can be adjusted to see what characteristics the bees respond to. In this way, it can be used as a device for scientific experiments on bee communication, not just as a practical device for beekeepers to tell their bees where to go.

The screen should be retractable, so as to avoid blocking off the honeycomb behind it when the bees need to access it, and it should also have a textured surface that bees can easily walk on, so that the real bees can also perform their own waggle dances on it (to avoid extending/retracting between consecutive dances, which may be disruptive). It can also be a touchscreen, to record the real bees' waggle dances, and thereby notify the beekeepers or scientists of where they've found flowers.

The screen may need to be capable of displaying ultraviolet light (which, I think, should be possible with only minimal retooling of the production line), because the bees may not pay attention to it if it doesn't have a similar spectrum to a real bee. But this is one of the things it can be used to experiment on. Others include the bees' acceptance of various values of realisticity of the bee image and its motion, for example.

It can also be equipped with:
* speakers (because I hypothesize based on nothing that bees may respond in some way to sounds during the waggle dance, and speakers are cheap enough to include on a lark*), -(ETA: apparently bees do detect sound by the same mechanism as they detect electric fields [link])-
* magnetic field sensors and coils (because apparently waggle dances' orientation is influenced in a predictable way by the ambient magnetic field [link]),
* odor emitters (because apparently bees also respond strongly to flower scents as a communication of where to go [link], and bees emit specific pheromones while dancing [link]),
* radios that emit signals similar to cell phone signals (because apparently bees can be confused by those [link]), and
* electric field emitters (possibly a secondary use of capacitive touchscreen electrodes) (because apparently the bees in the audience pick up on the dancer's electric field to observe her motion [link]),
to experiment with the effect of those variables on the bees' interpretation of the dance.

As well, it can be used to try to find ways to tell bees where *not* to go (e.g. because there are predators, neonicotinoids, or nectar that results in bad-tasting honey there). Maybe this can be done by building a compound dance out of the waggle dance and the tremble dance [link], which is used currently to tell other bees "don't go out foraging right now, but instead help me unload the nectar I'm carrying".

Apparently, also, real bees' waggle dance is quite inaccurate in conveying the direction and distance of the nectar source. If the communicator is used to communicate more accurately than the bees do, this could be used to experiment with training the bees themselves to dance more accurately, which might result in an increase (or a decrease) in the hive's foraging efficiency.

*Google didn't give me any pages saying larks predate bees, so this should be fine.

66/440 [2019-05-23]