Dancing can be found all over the animal world displays of grace and
strength are often used to attract mates or intimidate competitors.
But in honeybees, the waggle dance is so much more than self promotion.
Imagine that you are bee flying out to find a food source and you keep going there coming back.
If you were to draw a little map of that, you would see this portion,
which is mostly straight, going out to the food source. And then
curving to come back, going out to the food source, curving to come back.
Essentially, that's what the waggle dance is. It's
a miniature map of where the bee goes in the environment.
The waggle dance contains three critical pieces of information.
The direction of the waggle gives the direction of the food source.
The duration of the waggle indicates how far away the food is.
And the repetition of the whole dance indicates how good the food source is.
The more exciting the food source, the more rapidly the bee will repeat it's dance.
Researchers recently designed an experiment that aimed at
understanding the role of social learning in this complex behavior.
So we were trying to learn about the importance of social information for bees.
Honey bees are famous for being incredibly social.
So when they're born, they start off as nurses working inside. And as they get older,
they start to work outside the nest as trash bees, guard bees, and finally as foragers.
So what happens as a bee gets older at a certain age, she starts to become very interested in other
foragers. And in particular it seems that almost all of them are following waggle dances of older,
more experienced bees before they themselves tried to waggle dance.
In order to study the role of social learning from more experienced dancers. The researcher has set
up a single cohort colony where all the bees were the same age, and compared them
to control colonies with bees of all ages, where the young could learn from the old.
We caught them on their first venture out. The first time
they were out in the world trying to find flowers.
We needed to make sure that we observed their first waggle dances.
We gave them an incredible food source, this rich sugar feeder,
and they came back and they started to dance.
So what we found is that when bees do their first dances in the experimental
colonies, they were pointing in different directions on average,
more than the first dances of control bees that had teachers.
The experimental bees started off making more errors than the control bees,
but they were able to correct this over time as they matured.
Meanwhile, the control bees had a low level
of error from the start that held throughout their lives.
The experimental bees also made errors and how they communicated distance.
The distance to feeders was the same for all of the bees,
but the experimental bees always danced longer than the control bees.
Now, when we looked at them later in life we would think maybe they could have corrected themselves.
After all, they were watching the dances of other bees and they were practicing. They never did.
They always overshot. So it looked like that was
acquired and sort of fixed for the lifetime of the bee.
This led the researchers to consider whether there was a
critical learning period for certain tasks in a complex behavior, like a waggle dance.
In many languages we see a kind of sensitive phase.
Classically, this has been called imprinting.
It's almost as if there's a space inside the brain
that is open for a limited period of time to that kind of learning.
We know the same thing in many types of songbirds. We even know about this in naked mole rats.
So is there something that once it's set inside
the bee brain that the bee can't really change that?
And it looks like the distance encoding is that thing.
The improvements that the experimental bees made in their waggle angle showed that learning
some things without teachers is possible, but the persistent errors in the their distance
encoding suggests that learning this particular skill from experienced dancers is critical.
Researchers are now interested in whether errors
made in one generation might be passed down to the next
In many ways, our understanding of animal culture is based upon the
teaching and the transmission of this kind of information.
So what I would like to know is where learning is involved?
What is the actual reason for that?
While this cultural transmission may just make difficult tasks, easier to learn.
Scientists suspect that it could play a larger role helping species
or even individual colonies adapt to various and changing environments.