The complex forms of communication of bees

Researchers have discovered the early social learning in insects in a study where they have verified that the signaling that honey bees communicate about food sources, transmitted through the call bee dance is a complex form of social learning and one of the most complex known examples of non-human referential spatial communication, as published in the journal Science ⁽¹⁾.

Early social learning has been documented in insects, though it is evident in species ranging from human infants to naked mole rats to songbird chicks.

The transmission of shared knowledge from one generation to another is a distinctive feature of culture and allows animals to quickly adapt to a changing environment. Early social learning has been documented in insects, though it is evident in species ranging from human infants to naked mole-rats to songbird chicks.

Early learning of social cues

Now the researcher james nieh of the University of California at San Diego, and colleagues have found evidence that the social learning It is essential for honey bees. They found that the bee dance, or dance, which signals the location of critical resources to its nest mates through an intricate series of movements, is enhanced by learning and can be transmitted culturally.

The study demonstrates the importance of early learning of social cues in one of the most complex known examples of non-human referential spatial communication.

“We are beginning to understand that, like us, animals can transmit information important for their survival through communities and families. Our new research shows that we can now extend that social learning to include insects“, says Nieh, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution.

Performed at breakneck speed (each bee moves a body in less than a second), the dance movements translate visual information from the hive environment and the location of the sun into distance, direction, and even resource quality for their fellow bees. nest.

A social insect with a highly organized community structure, honey bees help ensure the survival of their colonies. communicating with each other the location of food sources through a dance in which bees go round in circles forming figures of eight while wiggling their bodies during the middle part of the dance.

Performed at breakneck speed (each bee moves a body in less than a second), the dance movements translate visual information from the hive environment and the location of the sun into distance, direction, and even resource quality for their fellow bees. nest. Conveying this information accurately is a remarkable feat because bees must move quickly across an often uneven honeycomb surface.

Nieh and fellow researchers Shihao Dong, Tao Lin, and Ken Tan, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), conducted experiments to check the details of communication through dance. They created colonies to study the information transmission process between expert foraging bees and their younger, less experienced nest mates.

The experimenters created colonies in which the bees they were never able to observe or follow the dancers before they danced for the first time. These colonies were made up of young bees of the same age. Bees start dancing when they reach the right age and always follow experienced dancers before they try to dance for the first time. In these experimental colonies, the bees were never able to learn from the more experienced dancers.

“Bees that did not have the opportunity to follow any dancer before dancing for the first time produced significantly more disordered dances, with greater divergence errors in wiggle angle, and they coded the distance incorrectly“, the researchers point out in the article.

just like humans

In contrast, bees that closely followed other dances in control colonies did not suffer from these problems. Like humans, for whom early exposure to language development is essential the bees acquired social cues that were encoded and remained with them throughout their lives (about 38 days).

Which They didn’t learn the right dance early they were able to improve by observing other dancers and practicing, but they were never able to correctly code the distance. This distance coding creates the different “dialects” of different species of honey bees. In other words, bees that were never able to observe other ballerinas during their first critical stage of learning developed a new dialect that they maintained for the rest of their lives.

Bees that were never able to observe other dancers during their first critical stage of learning developed a new dialect that they carried on for the rest of their lives.

“Scientists believe that bee dialects are shaped by their local environments. If so, it makes sense for a colony to pass on a dialect well adapted to that environment,” says Nieh. So the results provide evidence that social learning determines honey bee signaling as is the case with early communication in many vertebrate species that also benefit from learning.

With their new results, Nieh and his colleagues now want to understand the role of the environment in the formation of the language of bees. In the future, they would like to find out if the oldest bees and experienced colonists, knowing the distribution of food sources in their environment, could pass on an optimized dialect to the next generation.

They also worry that external threats may disrupt this early language learning. Multiple studies, including those by Nieh and her colleagues, have demonstrated the damage that commonly used pesticides can inflict on bees.

Multiple papers and studies have shown that pesticides can impair cognition and learning in honey bees, and therefore pesticides could impair their ability to learn to communicate and potentially even reshape how this communication is passed on to the next generation. of bees from a colony

“We know that bees are highly intelligent and have the ability to do extraordinary things,” Nieh said. “Multiple papers and studies have shown that pesticides can impair cognition and learning in honey bees, and therefore pesticides could damage their ability to learn to communicate and potentially even reshape the way this communication is passed on to the next generation of bees in a colony.”