Insect Communication

This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is on the topic of communication. As you’d expect from me, I’ve gone with nature and small things…

Bees perform dances to tell other bees where the best food is. While I don’t have photos of bees dancing, I do have plenty of photos of bees doing other things!

Hoverflies don’t have pollen sacs, but it’s still possible to communicate where they’ve been. This one has a lot of pink pollen around her face, so even if she wasn’t still sat on a Scabious flower, it wouldn’t be hard to work out where she’d been!

Some insects use the sense of smell to communicate. Females give off pheromones which the males detect, so that they can find the female and mate.

Grasshoppers use sound to communicate. The chirping sound they make is one of the things that says ‘summertime’ to me. I enjoy trying to find out where the sound is coming from and getting a photo before they hop away!

Damselflies communicate with females by basically showing off! They swoop about showing off their lovely colours and their flying prowess, and hover by the females to make sure they’ve seen. The female then communicates back by sticking around or flying away. The males communicate quite vigorously with each other too, saying ‘this is my patch, go away’ pretty clearly! Their colours also communicate who’s who, generally the brighter, more eye-catching ones are the males.

If a female damselfly approves of a male, they move on to the next stage …

Dragonflies behave in much the same way as Damsels. The males defend their territories and show off to the females, hoping for their approval.

Hope you’ve enjoyed a little delve into the world of insect communication 🙂 All in all, it would seem insect communication is a lot more straightforward than human communication!