Back in the 1940s Karl von Fritsch worked out the significance of the honeybee waggle dance. This astonishing behavior occurs inside a pitch dark hive when a bee returning from a feeding foray does a dance by waggling its abdomen that signals to other bees - which feel the dancer's moves with their forelegs - which direction and how far they should fly to find food.
The dance even factors in such variables as cloud cover and windage. It's truly astonishing and how and why such a behavior could have evolved is a profound mystery. It's especially mysterious since some research is suggesting that honey bees usually ignore the dance and rely on other methods to find food, but if the dance is irrelevant surely that just deepens the mystery.
After all, the dance is still an accurate means of directing other bees to food whether they ignore it or not so the question of how and why an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of sand developed such an elaborate behavior is still unanswered.
Moreover, if the dance is unnecessary or ignored then we're faced with the question as to how it evolved when it may not confer any particular advantage on the bees. We're also confronted with the puzzle of explaining, if the bees don't need it and don't pay much attention to it, how and why it's retained in the genome.
Anyway, the John 10:10 Project has released another beautiful and amazing film which features the honeybee's astonishing skill in engineering the hive in which the waggle dance takes place. The bees' ability to construct the combs in the hive really is uncanny given the size of their brain as this 7 minute video shows:
The more we learn about the biological world the more difficult it becomes for those who wish to defend the idea that it all happened naturalistically. Biological discovery in the last fifty years has made the hypothesis of intentional design of life by an intelligent agent more plausible and more intellectually appealing today than at any time in the last two hundred years.
