Bee Dance
Definition
A Bee Dance is a type of behavior performed by bees when locating pollen in distant fields. It is used to notify other hive members of the location of the honey in the hive. Each dance pattern contains instructions on how to move in order to reach each resource.
Applications
In the digital realm, the bee dance takes the form of a hyperlink shared between one person to many others. Examples of bee dance behavior in humans can be seen on Twitter or Facebook in the form of posted URLs in status updates. Short URLs are a more efficient form of bee dance than long URLs.
The bee dance is an appropriate metaphor for other reasons as well. Many linguists understand the defining feature of human language to be syntax (rules for the combination of individual signs to create novel meanings). While dogs have basic signals (wag tail, whine, bark, etc.), they do not have rules for stringing these elements together to form novel semantic meaning. We have some evidence that monkeys have simple syntax, but few other animals exhibit syntactic structure. The one major exception is the bee dance. Each component of the dance acts as a specifically placed unit in the whole so bees can communicate complicated directions to the rest of the hive. Thought about this way, the bee dance references the ability of individual nodes in a hive mind to send directions to other nodes using highly structured form of language. Sound familiar?
