Honey Bee Dance Language Research Articles

Strong Interspecific Differences in Foraging Activity Observed Between Honey Bees and Bumble Bees Using Miniaturized Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

Central place foragers depart from and return to a central location with enough resources for themselves, and in many cases, for the group. Honey bees and bumble bees are eusocial central place foragers. Honey bees use their unique dance language to recruit foragers to the most profitable patches. Bumble bees, on the other hand, exploit patches individually and develop trapline foraging patterns. Given the greater efficiency of the honey bee dance language for communicating the location of profitable resources to other foragers, based on optimal foraging theory, we predicted that bumble bees would put forth greater foraging effort than honey bees. We further hypothesized that both honey bees and bumble bees would respond to local resource availability, and that the foraging effort would reflect temporal fluctuations in colony needs. Using miniaturized radio frequency identification (RFID), we tracked the foraging patterns of individual bees to and from hives at three sites and over five time periods during the 2016 flowering season in south-central Wisconsin. Pollen pellets were also collected from bees returning to the hive. We compared the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the common eastern bumble bee, Bombus impatiens. Linear mixed effect models determined the impact of bee species, time of season (period) and site, and their interactions, on multiple foraging effort metrics and on pollen dry weight. Relative to honey bees, individual bumble bees made more foraging trips each day, resulting in a greater time spent foraging. A greater proportion of RFID tagged bumble bees foraged each day and bumble bees brought heavier pollen sacs to the hive compared to honey bees. Foraging bout duration did not vary between bee species and none of the foraging effort metrics varied among time periods or among sites. Both bee species, however, brought heavier pollen sacs back to the hive at the beginning and the end of the flowering season. These results are discussed in terms of the different foraging strategies of the two bee species, temporal and spatial variation in resource availability, and with reference to future research using miniaturized animal tracking technologies in the context of optimal foraging theory.

How habitat affects the benefits of communication in collectively foraging honey bees.

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) use the dance language to symbolically convey information about the location of floral resources from within the nest. To figure out why this unique ability evolved, we need to understand the benefits it offers to the colony. Previous studies have shown that, in fact, the location information in the dance is not always beneficial. We ask, in which ecological habitats do honey bee colonies actually benefit from the dance language, and what is it about those habitats that makes communication useful? In this study, we examine the effects of floral distribution patterns on the benefits of dance communication across five different habitats. In each habitat, we manipulated colonies' ability to communicate and measured their foraging success, while simultaneously characterizing the naturally occurring floral distribution. We find that communication is most beneficial when floral species richness is high and patches contain many flowers. These are ecological features that could have helped shape the evolution of the honey bee dance language.

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

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.

Can an Insect Speak?

In this paper I investigate the scientific understanding of the honeybee dance language. I elucidate the implicit and explicit reasons why the honeybees’ communication system has been referred to as a ‘language’, and examine the ways this designation has entangled the themes of animal mind and human– animal continuity. I end with an investigation of a scientific controversy surrounding the honeybee dance language. I argue that this controversy was a battle over assumptions regarding insect capacities, and a willingness or unwillingness to abandon those assumptions in the face of a phenomenon that undermined them.

Why do honey bees dance?

The honey bee dance language, used to recruit nestmates to food sources, is regarded by many as one of the most intriguing communication systems in animals. What were the ecological circumstances that favoured its evolution? We examined this question by creating experimental phenotypes in which the location information of the dances was obscured. Surprisingly, in two temperate habitats, these colonies performed only insignificantly worse than colonies which were able to communicate normally. However, foraging efficiency was substantially impaired in an Asian tropical forest following this manipulation. This indicates that dance language communication about food source locations may be important in some habitats, but not in others. Combining published data and our own, we assessed the clustering of bee forage sites in a variety of habitats by evaluating the bees’ dances. We found that the indicated sites are more clustered in tropical than in temperate habitats. This supports the hypothesis that in the context of foraging, the dance language is an adaptation to the particular habitats in which the honey bees evolved. We discuss our findings in relation to spatial aggregation patterns of floral food in temperate and tropical habitats.

Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing.

The honeybee dance language, in which foragers perform dances containing information about the distance and direction to food sources, is the quintessential example of symbolic communication in non-primates. The dance language has been the subject of controversy, and of extensive research into the mechanisms of acquiring, decoding and evaluating the information in the dance. The dance language has been hypothesized, but not shown, to increase colony food collection. Here we show that colonies with disoriented dances (lacking direction information) recruit less effectively to syrup feeders than do colonies with oriented dances. For colonies foraging at natural sources, the direction information sometimes increases food collected, but at other times it makes no difference. The food-location information in the dance is presumably important when food sources are hard to find, variable in richness and ephemeral. Recruitment based simply on arousal of foragers and communication of floral odour, as occurs in honeybees, bumble bees and some stingless bees, can be equally effective under other circumstances. Clarifying the condition-dependent payoffs of the dance language provides new insight into its function in honeybee ecology.

A comprehensive honey bee dance and odour ‘language’ hypothesis

The honey bee dance language hypothesis proposed by Karl von Frisch claims that a honey bee can indicate the direction and distance of a new food source through a ‘dance’ in the hive. Bees then fly directly to the food source. However an alternative hypothesis expounded by Adrian Wenner is that these bees search only for odour plumes. My hypothesis is that the dance contains information about the ecological reality in which bees exist which has hitherto not been recognized and which is utilized by bees to maximize their foraging success. If a new, desirable source of food appears, other new locations of the same source are more than likely to soon appear. Some bees that follow the dance may use the distance and direction information to avoid the known location, in order to search in other directions for new locations of the new food source which they will find by following odour plumes. The colony can thus most quickly both exploit the known location and, find and exploit new locations of the same food.

The honeybee dance-language controversy

Language is usually credited with being the major factor in making humans so different from other higher animals. The fact that honey bees have a dance language that is unparalleled in the rest of the animal kingdom is therefore of great interest. Successful forager bees communicate information about the source of food discovered by them, to their sisters upon returning home. They do this by means of a round dance (which only says, there is food nearby) or a waggle dance which gives information about the distance, direction and quantity of food to be expected. Karl Von Frisch bagged the Nobel Prize in 1973, mainly for deciphering the dance language of honey bees. However there are some sceptics who believe that the dance that the foragers do perform may have no communication value and that bees locate sources of food based on the scent left behind by the discoverer on the way to and at the location of the food source. While bees can find food based on such odours, recent experiments, using a robot bee, convincingly demonstrate that bees can also find food, in the absence of smell, on the basis of information communicated through the dance language.

Genic control of honey bee dance language dialect

Behavioural genetic analysis of honey bee dance language shows simple Mendelian genic control over certain dance dialect differences. Worker honey bees of one parent colony (yellow) changed from round to transition dances for foraging distances of 20 m and from transition to waggle dances at 40 m. Worker bees of the other parent colony (black) made these shifts at 30 m and 90 m, respectively. F1 colonies behaved identically to their yellow parent, suggesting dominance. Progeny of backcrossing between the F1 generation and the putative recessive black parent assorted to four classes, indicating that the dialect differences studied are regulated by genes at two unlinked loci, each having two alleles. Honey bee dance communication is complex and highly integrated behaviour. Nonetheless, analysis of a small element of this behaviour, variation in response to distance, suggests that dance communication is regulated by subsets consisting of simple genic systems.

Zur Kontroverse über die Bienen-Sprache

Zur Kontroverse über die Bienen-Sprache

The transfer of information in the dance language of honeybees: progress and problems

The dance language of honeybees will always be associated with the name of Karl von Frisch, who was one of the two founders of Zeitschrift fur Vergleichende Physiologie, now the Journal of Comparative Physiology. The discovery of the dance language has already led to a great number of investigations of physiological mechanisms, and more studies can be expected in the future. It therefore seems most appropriate to let this King Solomon Lecture deal with the progress and problems in our efforts to understand the transfer of information in the dance language of honeybees.

The honey bee dance language controversy

L'A. s'interesse a l'histoire de la controverse (menee par Adrien Wenner) concernant le langage de la danse des abeilles decouvert par Karl von Frish. Le desaccord proviendrait du probleme de l'emploi du mot langage et donc de celui de communication et de la capacite cognitive d'une abeille.

Assessing the benefits of cooperation in honeybee foraging: search costs, forage quality, and competitive ability

The foragers in honeybee colonies cooperate by sharing information about rich sources of food. This study examines three hypotheses about the benefits of this cooperation: (H1) it decreases foragers' costs in finding new food sources, (H2) it increases the quality of the food sources located by foragers, and (H3) it increases the ability of a colony's foragers to compete for high-quality food sources. To test each hypothesis, we identified a critical pattern in the foraging process which, if observed, would cast doubt on that hypothesis, and then gathered data to check for these patterns. Our observations do not support the first hypothesis, but do support the second and third. These results, in addition to helping us understand the functional significance of the honeybee's dance language, provide insights into the colonial organization of foraging by honeybees.

Evolution of the Dance Language

The dance language of honey bees is the most remarkable nonhuman communication system known. Von Frisch offered hypotheses regarding both the origin and the subsequent evolution of the dance language. In the context of recent results, we review his hypothesis regarding the origin of the dance: that it arose as a flight-intention movement combined with a few behavioral "artifacts" (apparently functionless behaviors that are probably best viewed as adaptively neutral by-products of otherwise adaptive information processing). An alternative scenario, in which the dance evolved from the bees' cognitive map, seems in many ways more plausible. Among the four species of honey bee and among the races of Apis mellifera, many differences in the dance appear to have adaptive value, casting some light on the later evolution of the dance. In particular, we discuss the roles of sound versus vision in the dances, which appear related to nesting ecology; of the imprecision in distance and direction indication, which appears to be "tuned" to an optimal patch size; and of the various distance dialects, which appear to be consequences of winter stress.

Processing of sun-azimuth information by honey bees

The dance language of honey bees ( Apis mellifera) indicates with good accuracy the distance and direction of a food source. When the direction of a food source is moved, however, the dances of returning foragers indicate the former location rather than the new direction just visited. After subsequent trips the dancers slowly accommodate to the change, and full compensation is achieved only after about 40 min. These and other equally curious results suggest that a running-average processing system may be at work in honey bee navigation.