Bees learn to communicate by dancing

Bees that have never been able to observe experienced companions dancing to communicate exactly where food is, also dance, but They transmit signals inaccurately and incorrectly.

Bees communicate with a kind of dance

For communicate information about the exact location and quality of a food source to swarm members, honey bees perform complex signaling movements.

during the dance They follow a figure-eight pattern and oscillate their abdomen. The time that the dance lasts communicates the distance and the angle of oscillation of the abdomen together with the orientation of the trace, indicates the direction in which one must fly in relation to the position of the sun.

Different species of bees and even different colonies of the same species show slightly different patterns, so they obviously have dialects when they communicate.

Young bees without role models

Until now it was not clear if the dance was a completely innate behavior or whether social learning also played a role, similar to other complex forms of communication.

If the behavior were completely innate, there should be no difference in performance between young bees and those that have been able to witness the dance of other scouts.

To prove this, a research team led by Dr. Shihao Dong, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Yunnan, examined bee colonies made up exclusively of newborn animals.

“Usually, young collectors have the opportunity to learn from older individuals,” Dong and his team explain. “At the age of eight days, they begin to follow the experienced dancers, and at twelve days they begin to dance themselves.”

However, in the bee colonies created for the experiment, young bees had no role models, but they began to dance, which proved that this type of communication has something innate.

Early learning is necessary

But while the young bees in the control colonies, which could orient themselves in older animals, made the correct movements from the start, the young bees in the study had problems.

The bees who didn’t get a chance to follow the veterans before they danced for the first time They held messy dances that they could not accurately transmit the information, explains the team in the investigation.

The study authors wondered if the mistakes could be corrected throughout life as the bees gained experience. To find out, Dong and his colleagues observed the bees again 20 days later, toward the end of their lives (about six weeks). When the same bees were older and experienced in dancing, they significantly reduced direction errors and produced more orderly dances. However, they were never able to perform distance coding with the same accuracy as bees that had learned as young how to do it. Interestingly, the bees that had to improvise reported greater distances to food.

Critical phase of social learning

Thus, although the bees partially compensated for the deficits over time through experience, they retained certain failures. From the point of view of the researchers, this indicates that there is a critical phase at the beginning of the life of the bee, in which the subtleties of dance are acquired through social learning.

During this time, the ethnic-specific dialect is also taught. The young bees, lacking this opportunity, developed a kind of defective dialect of their own, which they maintained throughout their lives.

Pesticide threat?

In future studies, the team would like to further investigate what role the environment plays in the development of bee dialects.

The question of to what extent external threats, such as pesticides, disrupt language acquisition in social insects is also an open question.

“We know that bees are highly intelligent and can do extraordinary things,” says co-author James Nieh of the University of California, San Diego. “Several publications and studies have shown that pesticides can affect the cognitive abilities and learning ability of honey bees”.

Therefore, pesticides could affect their ability to learn to communicate and potentially even change the way communication is passed on to the next generation of bees in a colony.”

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