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No. 2: Dance like somebody's watching

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Dance like somebody's watching

First | Previous | 2015-02-04 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=2

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{Ellen Miller looks on curiously as a bee lands on her hand. The bee does a waggle dance at an angle of 30 degrees to the vertical, taking 3 seconds for the waggle pass.}
Ellen Miller: What's that, girl? Timmy fell down a well? About 2 miles away, on a bearing of 30 degrees to the sun?

The author writes:

An earlier viewer of this strip observed that bees appear to be metric, which I had also been thinking when I read up on the dance. They do the waggle for about one second per kilometre.

I guess the bees would have converted to metric pretty early on - with limited processing power, simplifying calculations would have reduced the mental code base required, and sped up communication. Bumblebees don't really like change, though, so they probably still use miles among themselves.

The strip was pencilled and inked by hand, scanned and coloured (if you can call it that) in Inkscape. Clearly I have some work to do on drawing faces that are good likenesses, or even just consistent with each other, for that matter...