Question at position 41 Imagine you are a honey bee worker living in a hive in Ithaca, NY. One of your sisters, a fellow forager, returns from a nectar-collecting trip very excited about a floral resource. She performs a waggle dance to tell you where to go to find it: starting at the top of a comb, she runs straight down before looping back to the top and doing it again. When leaving the hive, according to her directions, you will head…Due south in search of the floral resource.90 degrees to the right of the sun in search of the floral resourceIn the opposite direction of the sun in search of the floral resource.

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Restating the scenario and the answer choices helps set up the reasoning: a forager bee performs a waggle dance to communicate the location of a floral resource, with directional information encoded relative to the sun.
Option 1: 'Due south in search of the floral resource.' If leaving the hive head due south, this would imply a fixed cardinal direction independent of solar cues. Honey bees encode distance and direction in the waggle dance relative to the position of the sun, not as an absolute geographic direction like due south; so this option ignores the sun-based coordinate system bees use, making it an inaccurate interpretation.
Option 2: '90 degrees to the right of the sun in search of the floral resource' The waggle dance conveys direction relative to the sun's position at the hive, with the angle of the waggle run corresponding to the angle between the sun and the resource. A direction 90 degrees to the right of the sun fits the standard mapping: if the sun is at a certain azimuth, the conveyed direction is offset by that angle to the perceived resource location. This option aligns with the established bee communication mechanism and is a plausible interpretation of a waggle-dance-based message.
Option 3: 'In the opposite direction of the sun in search of the floral resource.' Communicating a direction opposite the sun would invert the directional cue, yielding a location that is not consistent with the typical sun-relative encoding used in waggle dances. This would misrepresent the resource location, making it an incorrect understanding of the dance.
Now, integrating the above analyses: the bees' waggle dance encodes direction as an angle relative to the sun, so the instruction about heading 90 degrees to the right of the sun correctly translates the dance cue into a flight direction. The other options fail to capture the sun-relative frame or misinterpret the fixed cardinal direction, leading to erroneous pursuit paths.
In the context of the provided scenario, the option that matches the expected sun-based directional encoding is the one stating heading 90 degrees to the right of the sun in search of the floral resource, while the other choices omit or misrepresent the sun-relative reference or imply an incorrect absolute direction.

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