TOEFL Listening

🎧 Listening Transcript

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. Professor: So we’ve been talking about animal communication, and today I want to focus on a fascinating example: the waggle dance of honeybees. When a forager bee finds a good nectar source, she returns to the hive and performs a series of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. This dance communicates two key pieces of information: distance and direction. The distance is encoded by the duration of the waggle phase—the longer the waggle run, the farther the food source. Direction is indicated by the angle of the dance relative to vertical, which corresponds to the angle of the food source relative to the sun. However, bees also adjust for the sun’s movement over time. Recent research suggests that the dance is not just a simple signal; it’s a dynamic response to the profitability of the food source. For example, if the nectar is very rich, the dance is more vigorous and repeated more often, recruiting more foragers. This flexibility shows that bee communication is more complex than we once thought.