Mutual understanding (Recent Research, BfDJ 88)

Mutual understanding

An international research team has shown that Asian and European honey bees can learn to understand one another's dance languages despite having evolved different forms of communication,.

The species of Apis honey bees found worldwide separated about 30-50 million years ago, and subsequently developed different dance 'languages'. The content of the messages is similar, but the precise encoding of these languages differs between species.

“We know that the members of a honey bee colony routinely exchange information via dance about the location of newly discovered locations, like feeding places, water or new nesting sites,” explains Dr Shaowu Zhang from the Research School of Biological Sciences at The Australian National University (ANU). “The scout bees perform the so-called ‘bee dances’ inside the nest. The co-ordinates of distant locations are encoded in the waggle phase of this ballet, with the direction and distance to the food source indicated by the orientation and duration of the dance. This duration differs across honey bee species, even if they fly the same distance in the same environment. It is these differences which we can think of as distinct languages.”

The research team is the first to successfully study the behaviour of a colony containing a mixture of two different species of bees. One of the first findings of this novel approach was that Asian honey bees Apis cerana and European Apis mellifera, after some time of adjustment in the mixed colony, could share information and work together to gather food. Asian honey bees followed the dances of European forager bees, and deciphered the encoded information correctly.

“The dance language of honey bees is among the best studied communication systems in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, surprises are still possible, as we have shown,” Dr Zhang said. “This work has potentially major implications for our understanding of animal communication. Next we plan to study the extent of variation between different bee dance languages.”

Simon Couper, ANU Media Office

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