East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees

Songkun Su,Shenglu Chen,Jürgen Tautz,Aung Si,Fang Cai,Shaowu Zhang,Martin Giurfa

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002365

Songkun Su, Shenglu Chen + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0002365

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jun 4, 2008
Citations: 84	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Zhejiang University, Australian National University

Abstract

The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other. This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source. We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.

Highlights

When foraging honeybees find an attractive food source, they can perform a special communicative behaviour called the dance language, which was first discovered by Karl von Frisch [1]
Successful establishment of a mixed-species colony We organized two types of mixed colonies consisting of an Apis cerana cerana (Acc) queen, Acc workers and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml) workers, and two other mixed colonies consisting of an Aml queen, Aml workers and Acc workers
Individuals of each species generally displayed a similar likelihood of following dancers from both species (Figure 5). This is the first report of the successful establishment of a mixedspecies honeybee colony, with individuals of Apis cerana cerana and Apis mellifera ligustica cohabiting, foraging and carrying out normal hive functions, for the greater part harmoniously, for over 50 days

Summary

Introduction

When foraging honeybees find an attractive food source, they can perform a special communicative behaviour called the dance language, which was first discovered by Karl von Frisch [1]. The waggle dance is the most sophisticated of these three forms as it encodes direction and distance of the food source [1]. The waggle phase, instead of the entire circuit of the dance, was confirmed as a reliable indicator of the distance to the food source [3], [7,8,9]. By eavesdropping on this communication system, scientists have obtained a unique perspective into the perceptual world of insects [10]

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