the tempo of the dance that signals the distance from the source. For instance, in one experiment, a feeding dish was placed a thousand feet away, and the bee that discovered it performed fifteen complete cycles of the dance in thirty seconds. When the dish was placed two thousand feet away, the number dropped to eleven. The further away, the fewer the cycles.
And how do they work out the direction of the food? That’s shown by the straight-line part of the dance. If the dance is done on the platform in front of a hive, in the light of day, the orientation of the bee’s body along the line with respect to the sun is enough to point other bees directly towards the goal. Inside the hive, where it’s dark, the bee’s sense of gravity allows it to make an upwards movement against the honeycomb wall. It’s as if the bee draws a straight vertical line on the wall. If it then runs straight up the line, this tells the others that the food is in the same direction as the sun. If the food is, say, forty degrees to the left of the sun, the run points forty degrees to the left of this line.
It’s an amazingly sophisticated system, with modifications built in to allow for the sun’s movement across the sky. And it works. When other bees fly out, they know that the nectar source is, say, about half a mile away at a bearing of forty degrees left, and – from the excitement of the dance – how much nectar is likely to be there. And that’s the source they go for, ignoring everything else on the way. In one series of experiments, von Frisch placed other food dishes between the hive and the nectar source that the pioneer forager had found. The other bees flew straight over them, making a beeline, as it were, only for the source they’d been told about.
The bus that had been causing all the trouble finally made it into its parking bay, but my little traffic jam stayed put. A tractor was trying to follow it in, and that was now blocking the road. What on earth was a farmer doing at Pringle’s at this time of day? As it slewed around, I could see it was pulling a trailer with two sheep in it. Now that’s what I call service. Out of the field, into the Gaerwen auction, and onto a Pringle’s shelf, all in one afternoon.
I could hear the sound of the sheep above the noise of the traffic. Were there Welsh-English bleatlects? I fantasized about an article: ‘Dialects in the Language of the Sheep’. Von Frisch’s first experiments had used black Austrian honeybees. He then carried out some further experiments using Italian honeybees. The Italians restricted their round dances to distances of only thirty feet. For intermediate distances they performed a ‘sickle-shaped’ dance, which the Austrians did not do. Then, for distances over 120 feet they did the tail-wagging dance, but rather more slowly than the Austrians.
As a result, when the Austrian and Italian bees were placed in the same hive, the wagging dance of the Italians made the Austrians search for the feeding place too far away. And vice versa. They seemed to understand each other, but not exactly. Just like the dialects of human language, really, von Frisch thought.
If he’d studied the buzzing, he might have said accents too. I wonder if the sound of the buzz alters in proportion to the excitement?
The bee-dancing hypothesis was received with considerable scepticism at first. Later observations showed that the time it took for bees to arrive at the source was usually longer than von Frisch had predicted. Maybe it was all a mixture of chance, sight, and scent after all? But in 2005 a research team made more precise measurements to show that von Frisch’s dancing theory was right.
They used a method called harmonic radar – a system first used to track the location of avalanche victims. A tiny transponder was attached to a bee, and this returned radar signals enabling its flight path to be plotted. The team was able to demonstrate that the waggle dance was enough to enable most of the bees to reach the vicinity of the food. But they then needed sight and odour to pinpoint the final destination.
That was why von Frisch’s bees took longer than expected to reach the food. The dance got them to the railway station, as it were, but they had to find the right platform for themselves.
The busload of Japanese tourists had found their way onto the station platform and had lined up under the name sign. They were having trouble working out how to stand in front of it without obscuring the letters. The photographer was having trouble too, getting everybody into his shot. He backed away, momentarily forgetting that the railway line was right behind him. An eruption of Japanese – which, roughly translated, said, ‘Excuse our temerity in troubling you, Hiro, but you are about to fall onto a railway track and there is a train coming’– kept him safe.
After the train had passed he solved his problem by taking the photograph from the opposite platform. And his subjects solved theirs by having some of their party sit down on the ground in front of the name sign. It looked as if the letters were sprouting out of their heads.
Suddenly the jam cleared, and I drove on, leaving the sheep and Japanese behind. The road out of Llanfairpwll runs alongside the Menai Straits, and if you pull into a lay-by there is a splendid view of the two bridges – Thomas Telford’s fine Menai Suspension Bridge to the north, and the later Britannia Bridge, originally built by Robert Stephenson, a mile and a half to the south.
The suspension bridge was opened on 30 January 1826. It was one of the highest bridges of its day, because the Admiralty insisted that there should be room beneath it to allow the passage of sailing ships. It’s a hundred-foot drop to the water below. It carried the A5 from London to Holyhead – the first British road instituted by an Act of Parliament. The Irish Act of Union had been passed in 1801. Once the link was completed, Irish MPs would be able to make the journey down to the Houses of Parliament in two days instead of four.
Before the bridge there were only ferries – six main services, running at different points along the Straits, each under the control of a local landowner. A highly competitive business it was, I suppose much like the local taxi businesses in the area today. Apart from the time involved, and the danger from the strong currents, it could be expensive. Who pays the ferryman? You did – and sometimes twice! Some boatmen would charge you when you got onto the boat, and then charge you again before they let you off.
The ferry owners were totally against the project, but they were overruled by London, and work started on the bridge in 1819. Limestone was quarried at Penmon a few miles north, and carried down by boat. The ironwork was made at a Shrewsbury foundry. To prevent rust, it was immersed in warm linseed oil.
Lewis Carroll had a different idea. In Chapter 8 of Through the Looking Glass he has the White Knight come up with a unique preservation scheme. The Knight has been singing a song to Alice about the life-story told to him by ‘an aged, aged man, a-sitting on a gate’. Then, quite out of the blue, he reflects:
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed my design
To keep the Menai Bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.
A-sitting. That use of a-goes back to the Middle Ages. It is historically a form of on, which came to be used to emphasize the duration of an action, and especially its repeated character. If you were ‘a-shouting’, as Casca says the people do at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, you would be engaged in that activity for longer than if you were just ‘shouting’. You would be shouting over and over.
Why does Carroll use it here? Sitting isn’t a verb which needs an a- prefix. It is already expressing a continuous duration. The aged man wasn’t sitting repeatedly on his gate. So you wouldn’t expect to find an a-used.
What happened was that poets started to use the prefix to make up the ‘te-tum-te-tum’ rhythm of a line. It was a bit cheeky, really, but the nuance
