In a castaway test setup, groups of young honeybees figuring out how to forage on their own start waggle dancing spontaneously — but badly.
Waggling matters. A honeybee’s rump-shimmy runs and turning loops encode clues that help her colony mates fly to food she has found, sometimes kilometers away. However, five colonies in the new test had no older sisters or half-sisters around as role models for getting the dance moves right.
Still, dances improved in some ways as the youngsters wiggled and looped day after day, reports behavioral ecologist James Nieh of the University of California, San Diego. But when waggling the clues for distance information, Apis mellifera without role models never did match the timing and coding in normal colonies where young bees practiced with older foragers before doing the main waggle themselves.
The youngsters-only colonies thus show that social learning, or the lack of it, matters for communicating by dance among honeybees, Nieh and an international team of colleagues say in the March 10 Science. Bee waggle dancing, a sort of language, turns out to be both innate and learned, like songbird or human communication.
The dance may appear simple in a diagram, but executing it on expanses of honeycomb cells gets challenging. Bees are “running forward at over one body length per second in the pitch black trying to keep the correct angle, surrounded by hundreds of bees that are crowding them,” Nieh says.
2023-03-10 15:33:20
Link from www.sciencenews.org
Honeybees are known for their ability to communicate with one another through a sophisticated dance language known as the waggle dance. This dance, which involves rapidly shaking their abdomens and waggling their bodies, is used to alert other bees of the location of food sources, water, or other resources.
It has long been understood that this dance is a central feature of honeybee communication, allowing them to coordinate their foraging efforts and ensuring the survival of their colony. However, recent research has shown that honeybees actually require “dance lessons” to perfect their waggle communication.
Researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK recently conducted a series of experiments to better understand the learning process behind the waggle dance. They found that young honeybees are not born with an innate ability to perform the waggle dance correctly. Instead, they must learn the dance from older, more experienced bees.
The study revealed that young bees frequently make errors when attempting to communicate information through the waggle dance, such as overestimating or underestimating the distance to a food source. However, over time, these young bees improve their dance skills as they receive feedback and guidance from older bees.
This learning process is crucial for the survival of the colony. If young bees are unable to communicate the location of resources accurately, the colony’s foraging efforts may become disorganized and inefficient, leading to a decline in food resources and ultimately, the death of the colony.
The researchers found that the waggle dance is highly specific to the type of resource being communicated. For example, bees performing the waggle dance to communicate the location of a food source will produce a different dance depending on whether the food is nearby or far away.
Moreover, the study showed that the dance is influenced by the quality and quantity of the resource being communicated. Bees will perform a longer, more energetic waggle dance to communicate the location of a higher-quality food source, as opposed to a shorter, less energetic dance for lower-quality resources.
In conclusion, as fascinating as it is, the waggle dance is just one example of the incredible sophistication of honeybee communication. The role of experience and learning in the development of the waggle dance highlights the importance of honeybee social structure and collective behavior in the success of the colony. Honeybees’ dance lessons are one more example of the intricate and complex lives of these fascinating insects.