That's the Way I Waggle, Forager Bee Communication as Information Organization

Nina Zepcan
Master of Information Science Student
BLUE Fellowship
2026
BLUE Fellowship
2026

Background

Bees are a system just as any other requiring metadata, processing and parsing to be useful. This is an observation first made by my dad, who has been a hobbyist beekeeper for as long as I can remember. He used to say he could “talk” to the bees, allowing them to meet him at his level of audacity, of emotion. If he panics, they panic. This is a unique form of indexation that disrupts an anthropomorphic assumption on systems engineering. Organization can become something boarder than language or symbols, incorporating the non-human code through human observations in biology. This opens questions of what counts as organization, who (or what) can generate an index and what forms of information processing take place beyond human infrastructures. Ultimately, my project invites a reconceptualization of metadata without the organization conventions we might be used to.

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