Researchers Have Discovered How Honeybees Pick Up Their Waggle Dance Movements

 

Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were not allowed to hear human speech in order for a monarch to learn the true, innate language of humans.

Scientists now understand that social learning and interpersonal contact are prerequisites for the development of human language, a characteristic shared by many animal languages.

But why should people and other animals have to acquire a language when many other animal species are born with it?

My coworkers and I find this issue to be fascinating, and it served as the inspiration for a recent paper we published in the journal Science. I've spent decades as a scientist researching honeybee communication and its potential evolutionary history.

When asked whether language should be innate or learned, there are two prevalent responses.

 

For starters, as they are acquired, complex languages can frequently adapt to regional circumstances. A second response is that even when people are born with some understanding of the right signals, complex communication is frequently challenging to create.

What is a waggle dance?

 

Amazingly, one of the most intricate forms of animal communication is found in honeybees.

 

With a physical "waggle dance," they can communicate with one another about where to locate resources like food, water, or nesting areas. To the other bees in the colony, this dance indicates the location, size, and type of a resource.

 

By repeatedly moving in a figure-eight pattern focused on a waggle run, in which the bee waggles its abdomen as it advances, the dancer essentially directs recruits in the right direction and informs them of how far to go.

Making mistakes

Amazingly, one of the most intricate forms of animal communication is found in honeybees.

 

It's challenging to perform this exercise. The dancer is attempting to keep the proper waggle angle and duration while running at a speed of about one body length per second.

 

Additionally, it frequently occurs in complete blackness, amidst a swarm of swarming bees, and on an uneven surface.

 

Therefore, there are three distinct types of errors that bees can make: pointing in the wrong direction, signaling the incorrect distance, or performing the figure-eight dance pattern incorrectly more than once, a phenomenon known as disorder errors.

 

It is more difficult for recruits to locate the spot when the first two errors are made. It might be more difficult for recruits to follow the dancer due to disorder mistakes.

Scientists were aware that all bees of the species Apis mellifera start foraging and dancing only as they get older and that they first observe seasoned dancers. Could they be receiving instruction from skilled teachers?

A 'forbidden' bee experiment

 

By isolating our experimental bee colonies, my coworkers and I were able to produce bees that could not watch other waggle dances before beginning their own.

 

Because they were all the same age and lacked older, more seasoned bees to follow, these bees were similarly unable to observe the dance language as in the ancient experiment recounted by Herodotus.

 

Our control colonies, on the other hand, had bees of all ages, allowing the younger bees to follow the elder, more seasoned dancers.

 

In colonies with both population age patterns, we captured the first dances of the bees.

The directional, distance, and disorder mistakes in the dances made by the bees that were unable to mimic the movements of experienced bees were noticeably higher than those in the dances made by the control bees that were novice.

 

When the bees were seasoned foragers, we tried the same bees again. Because they had more experience or had ultimately learned by imitating other dancers, bees who had previously made a lot of directional and disorder mistakes now made significantly fewer.

 

 

The older control bees from colonies with instructors maintained the quality of their early dances in their older dances.

 

This discovery revealed that although bees are born with a basic understanding of how to perform, they can improve their dancing skills by imitating more seasoned bees.

Dance dialects are about distance

 

Regarding the bees who had started out without dance teachers, a mystery persisted. They were never able to fix their measurement mistakes. They kept going too far, talking over longer distances than usual.

 

 

 

Why does this concern scientists, then? The solution might lay in how remote communication could adjust to local circumstances.

 

In various environments, the distribution of food can vary significantly. As a consequence, various honeybee species have developed unique "dance dialects," which are characterized by a correlation between waggle dance duration and distance to a food source.

 

It's interesting that these languages differ even within the same species of honeybee. Because colonies of the same species can coexist in a variety of environments, researchers believe this variation occurs.