03/10/2023
“Nieh and fellow researchers Shihao D**g, Tao Lin and Ken Tan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) set up experiments testing the details involved in waggle dance communication. They created colonies to study the information transmission process between skilled forager bees and their younger, less experienced nestmates.
The experimenters created colonies in which bees were never able to observe or follow waggle dancers before they first danced. These colonies consisted of young bees that were all the same age. Bees begin to dance when they reach the right age and always follow experienced dancers before they first attempt to dance. In these experimental colonies, bees were therefore never able to learn from more experienced dancers.
“Bees without the opportunity to follow any dancers before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly,” the researchers noted in the paper.
In contrast, bees that shadowed other dances in control colonies did not suffer from such problems. Like humans, for which early exposure to language development is essential, the bees acquired social cues that were encoded and stayed with them for life (about 38 days). Those that did not learn the correct waggle dance early on were able to improve by subsequently watching other dancers and by practicing, but they were never able to correctly encode distance. This distance encoding creates the distinct “dialects” of different honey bee species. In other words, the bees that could never observe other dancers during their critical early stage of learning developed a new dialect that they maintained for the rest of their lives.”
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