TOEFL Listening

🎧 Listening Transcript

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. The professor is discussing the behavior of honeybees. 'Today, I want to talk about communication in honeybees, specifically the famous waggle dance. When a forager bee returns to the hive after finding a good food source, it performs a dance that conveys information about the direction and distance of that food source. The dance is a figure-eight pattern, and the angle of the straight run relative to the vertical indicates the angle of the food source relative to the sun. For example, if the bee runs straight up, that means the food is directly toward the sun. The speed of the dance, or the number of waggles, indicates the distance. But here's the interesting part: recent research suggests that this dance is not just an instinctive behavior. Young bees learn to improve their dance by observing older, experienced foragers. In an experiment, bees that grew up in a hive without older bees performed less accurate dances than those who had the opportunity to learn from experienced dancers. So, the waggle dance is both innate and learned, showing a surprising level of social learning in insects.'