Dancing Honeybees

East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees is the title of this PLOS One paper authored by Songkun Su, Fang Cai, Aung Si, Shaowu Zhang, Jürgen Tautz and Shenglu Chen. Quoting from the abstract of the paper:

The honeybee waggle dance, through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates, is acknowledged as the only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate. However, the suggestion, that different species of honeybee might possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance, remains controversial. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether different species of honeybee can learn from and communicate with each other. This study reports experiments using a mixed-species colony that is composed of the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc), and the European bee Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml). Using video recordings made at an observation hive, we first confirm that Acc and Aml have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments. When reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other: Acc foragers could decode the dances of Aml to successfully locate an indicated food source. We believe that this is the first report of successful symbolic communication between two honeybee species; our study hints at the possibility of social learning between the two honeybee species, and at the existence of a learning component in the honeybee dance language.

So the honeybee waggle dance is the only known symbolic communication form existing among invertebrates. I did not know that. This paper also notes that two different species of honeybee- the Asiatic bee Apis cerana cerana (Acc) and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml), the European bee- have distinct waggle dance dialects. The authors suggest a question that can be resolved experimentally namely, can different species of honeybee learn from and communicate with each other? And the answer? First a preliminary step- a quote from the paper:

Successful establishment of a mixed-species colony

We organized two types of mixed colonies consisting of an Apis cerana cerana (Acc) queen, Acc workers and Apis mellifera ligustica (Aml) workers, and two other mixed colonies consisting of an Aml queen, Aml workers and Acc workers. In the former colonies, the workers cohabited well for more than 20 days, while in the latter colonies, the Acc workers were killed and cleaned up by Aml workers after 2–3 days. Thus, we were only able to use the former mixed-species colony to carry out our experiments (see figure 1). We put the mixed colonies into observation hives when we transported them to the experimental location.

The stage is set by mixing bee colonies. The two mixed groups are Apis cerana cerana bees and Apis mellifera ligustica bees. More from the paper:

Acc and Aml possess distinct ‘dialects’ of the waggle dance

Figure 2 shows the waggle dance duration of Aml and Acc foragers, from mixed or pure colonies, that had been trained to an artificial feeder placed at different distances (100, 200, 300 and 400 m away). Under normal conditions, i.e. in single-species colonies, Acc foragers consistently had a much greater waggle duration for a given distance than did Aml foragers, as has been previously reported [13]. Further, the waggle durations of dancers from both species increased in a linear manner with increasing distance. The slope of the distance-waggle duration curve for Acc in the single-species colony was significantly steeper than that of Aml bees in the single-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 8.8, d.f. = 6, P<0.001, Figure 3). The slope for Acc in the mixed-species colony was also significantly steeper than that of the Aml bees in the same colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 4.4, d.f. = 6, P<0.01, Figure 3). Moreover, at the 100, 200, 300 and 400 meter positions, foragers of a particular species generally displayed similar waggle durations, regardless of whether they were from a single-species or mixed-species colony (P>0.05, ANOVA for Two-stage Nested Design and Tukey's test, see Table S1). The slope of the distance-waggle duration curve for Acc in the single-species colony was not significantly different to that of Acc in the mixed-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 2.3, d.f. = 6, P>0.05, Figure 3). Similarly, the curve for Aml in the single-species colony was not significantly different to that of Aml in the mixed-species colony (pairwise comparison, t-test, t = 1.44, d.f. = 6, P>0.05, Figure 3). The waggle duration results show that there really are dialect differences between Acc and Aml. The mean dance angle, the direction of the waggle run relative to the vertical direction, was not significantly different (P>0.05, pairwise t-test) between Acc and Aml in the mixed-species colony (Table 1; see Methods for details of analysis).

Studies document the symbolic communication differences in the dances of two honeybee species, Acc and Aml. Waggle duration is a distinguishing feature.