How Your Body Knows What Time It Is
Many organisms perform best at certain hours of the day. The slug species Arion subfuscus, living in almost total darkness, knowing nothing about the Gregorian calendar, lays its eggs between the last week of August and the first week of September.1 Bees forage for nectar, knowing the best times to visit the best fields and the exact timing of nectar secretions for individual species of flowers.
In the mid-20th century, the Austrian Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch provided enormous insights on honeybee communication and foraging time. He discovered that bees have internal clocks that tell them not only where the nectar is to be found but also precisely when that food will be ready. “I know of no other living creature,” he wrote in his book on bee language, “that learns so easily as the bee when, according to its ‘internal clock,’ to come to the table.”2
Even without a light clue, the plants were able to tell time.
Indeed, honeybees start their daily routines of harvesting nectar by the clock or, rather, by sun time. While studying bee routines at his lab at the University of Munich before World War II, Frisch trained bees to come regularly to lunch at strategic times when feeding stations were set up with sugar water. The bees quickly adjusted their natural schedules to Frisch’s artificial schedule. In just two days their old schedule was abandoned. Even informational nectar-finding flights were stopped.
Judging from the conclusions of Frisch’s experiments, it seems as if physiotemporal processes in animals and insects rely on some internal rhythm that we could call an internal clock. Whatever it is, it must have some connection to the external events of sunlight and moonlight, the local time of earth’s turning and orbiting. Frisch’s student Martin Lindauer later corroborated and advanced Frisch’s experiments by hatching bees in a controlled environment of 12-hour daylight and 12-hour darkness. When the bees reached maturity they were trained to head in a given direction for at least five days.3 They learned the time of day purely from the sun’s position.4 Lindauer and Frisch were very much surprised, since at that time it was well known that birds use innate migration routes to navigate their journeys, and so do many insects. But a bee’s journey is more complex because it changes from day to day.
here is another tree with many This quotation is a translation from the Greek that was written by Theophrastus of Eresos in the third century B.C. He was describing the daily leaf movements of the tamarind tree, suggesting that it is an organism whose physiology follows and responds to the time of day without any external cues, such as exposure to sunlight. Of course, we know now that all organisms have zeitgebers to help them adjust to seasonal variations of daylight, and so the tamarind surely had help from hidden cues. Buds appear without fail in the first week of April on a lilac bush on the south side of my house. The temperature could be close to freezing, and yet those buds will poke through as if to say,
