An experiment of mixing Asian and European bees in one hive has proven their ability to communicate with each other through a dance. The National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence in Vision Science funded the study.
The study was conducted to tell whether or not bees from different continents could communicate with each other, even though they didn’t speak the same language. There are only 9 known species of honeybees in the world and they communicate with each other by “dance languages,” discovered by scientist Karl von Frisch that could be up to 30 to 50 million years old.
There are 3 known classified forms of dance: a round dance signifies sources close to the colony, a sickle dance is performed for larger distances and a waggle dance is the most sophisticated of the three, encoding direction and distance of a given food source.
Honeybees use specific movements to let each other know, for example, where a certain flower nesting site is. “The coordinates of distant locations,” explains Shaowu Zhang of the Australian National University, “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.” Because of these differences, the scientists can pick out language and dance styles specific to a particular species.
During this instance, the Asian and European bees were trained by the scientists to fly to a feeder set at various distances from the hive. Once the European bees found the feeder successfully, the Asian bees quickly followed and were able to interpret where the feeder was and vice versa.
The ability of all species of bees being able to communicate in nature is unknown, however, as they don’t typically collide. The experiment established an artificially mixed colony for scientific purposes only. Check out PLoS ONE for a full report of the experiment’s data.
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