At first glance, there is a confusing chaos in beehives, in which the insects seem to be scurrying about aimlessly. In fact, some of the movements involve a complex and highly developed form of communication: Successful foragers use their waggle dance to tell their nestmates where they have found nectar. The bees move in a figure eight pattern and wiggle their abdomens.
The fast dances indicate distance, direction and even quality of the food source. A team led by biologists Shihao Dong from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and James Nieh from the University of California in San Diego have now examined this communication more closely and made an astonishing discovery.
The experiments revealed that the bee dance does have a genetic component, so that the insects are instinctively able to do it. In order to dance as flawlessly as possible, however, they have to learn from older, more experienced animals.
Specifically, the scientists set up colonies with western honey bees (Apis mellifera), all of which were one day old and were not given the opportunity to observe the waggle dance of older nestmates. Colonies, in which the youngsters could watch experienced dancers, served as control cohorts.
Although the patternless insects began dancing at a typical age of one to two weeks, they made significant errors in the distance and direction of the indicated food source. While the insects’ directional accuracy improved with increasing experience, they overestimated distance in their dances throughout their lives.
It is precisely this distance coding that is an important part of different “dance dialects”: A study involving researchers from the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg showed in 2020 that not only different bee species, but also bee colonies of the same species in different regions dance around the same bee for different lengths of time show distance.
As the authors of the current study now summarize, bees, who were never able to observe other dancers during their critical early learning phase, developed a new dialect that they retained for the rest of their lives.
The results provided evidence that social learning shapes honeybee signaling, as it does in early communication in many vertebrate species. It is all the more important that the bees’ early “language acquisition” is not disturbed, according to James Nieh.
“Several publications and studies have shown that pesticides can affect the cognitive abilities and learning abilities of honey bees,” says Nieh, “therefore, pesticides could impair their ability to learn how to communicate and possibly even change the way they do so.” communication is passed on to the next generation of bees in a colony.”
The two behavioral biologists Lars Chittka from Queen Mary University of London and Natacha Rossi from the University of Sussex also focus on a possible new perspective on the relationship between instinct and learning. In an independent commentary on the study, they write: “Some scientists assume that instinct is the ancestral (or primitive) state by default and learning is more advanced. The opposite is less often considered: individual learning may be the cause of some behavioral innovations that are not partly innate.”
The current work adds to the growing body of evidence that complex behaviors are rarely fully innate.
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