Honey bees dance to tell other bees that they have found nectar
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There can be no argument that the most famous aspect of honey bee biology is their method of recruitment, commonly known as the honey bee dance language. It has served as a model example of animal communication in biology courses at all levels, and is one of the most fascinating behaviors that can be observed in nature.
The dance language is used by an individual worker to communicate at least two items of information to one or more other workers: the distance and direction to a location (usually a food source, such as a patch of flowers). It is most often used when an experienced forager returns to her colony with a load of food, either nectar or pollen. If the quality of the food is sufficiently high, she will often perform a “dance” on the surface of the wax comb to recruit new foragers to the resource. The dance language is also used to recruit scout bees to a new nest site during the process of reproductive fission, or swarming. Recruits follow the dancing bee to obtain the information it contains, and then exit the hive to the location of interest. The distance and direction information contained in the dance are representations of the source's location (see Components of the Dance Language), and thus is the only known abstract “language” in nature other than human language.
The dance language is inextricably associated with Dr. Karl von Frisch, who is widely accredited with interpreting its meaning. He and his students carefully described the different components of the language through decades of research. Their experiments typically used glass-walled observation hives, training marked foragers to food sources placed at known distances from a colony, and carefully measuring the angle and duration of the dances when the foragers returned. His work eventually earned him the Nobel Prize (in Medicine) in 1973.
The concept of a honey bee language, however, has not been free of skepticism.
Several scientists, such as Dr. Adrian Wenner, have argued that simply because the dance exists does not necessarily mean that it communicates information about the location of a food source. Those critics have argued that floral odors on a forager's body are the major cues that recruits use to locate novel food sources. Many experiments have directly tested this alternative hypothesis and demonstrated the importance of floral odors in food location. In fact, von Frisch held this same opinion before he changed his mind in favor of the abstract dance language.
The biological reality, however, is somewhere between these two extremes. The most commonly accepted view is that recruits go to the area depicted in the dance, but then “home in” to the flower patch using odor cues. Indeed, researchers have built a robotic honey bee that is able to perform the dance language and recruit novice foragers to specific locations. The robot, however, is unable to properly recruit foragers to a food source unless there is some odor cue on its surface. Nevertheless, it is clear that honey bees use the distance and direction information communicated by the dance language, which represents one of the most intriguing examples of animal communication.