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Great Society is built from skilled people performing specific tasks to keep a functioning
Society. Mastering of language is an important skill to have, by doing so you can learn more
sophisticated skills faster and with greater precision. However a language is not innate in
our DNA. A language is something we have to learn from other members of the society. This is called,
social learning. Honeybees, one of the most successful Societies in Natural History,
are known for their capability to communicate with other colony members, a phenomenal discovered by
Dr Carl Von Frisch, Nobel Prize winner in 1973. Dr Frisch showed that forager bees are able to
go outside the colony, look for food, memorize the location and quality of the food source,
come back to the colony, and translate the findings into a series of movements that can be
understood by other colony members, and this way, they can go after the precious food source with
precision without spending any time searching for it. A dance that become known as the Waggle Dance.
the Waggle dance is a mini map of the food location, and contain three critical information:
The direction of the Waggle gives the direction of the food source, the duration of the Waggle
indicates how far the food sources is, and the repetition of the dance indicates how
good the food source is. In a honeypie society, honeybee workers use social learning when they are
following the waggle dance to learn the resources locations and quality. There are two separate
skills involved in waggle dance communication. One, the ability to read the code and locate the
food source, and the ability to write the code and communicate it to the other members of the colony.
It is unclear whether writing the code is a skill learned from older more experienced bees or if it
is completely innate to each individual and it will happen regardless. To investigate that,
researchers compared waggle dance behavior of forager bees from two different groups
of colonies: Same age colonies, where researchers build artificial colonies consisting only of same
age bees, and in these colonies new forager bees never come in contact with older more experienced
bees. And number two, control colonies: these are normal mixed age colonies with a variety
of individuals where young bees can follow and perhaps learn things from other bees. Once the
colonies were set up, the researchers also set up food resources at identical distances
and direction from each colony so they could measure potential errors in the waggle dance
between the two groups. Normal forager's bees, who have practiced the dance several times in
the presence of older bees make an average error of around 25 degrees from the correct direction
of the food source, while first dancers from the same normal colonies that also had the
chance to interact with older bees, were a little worse than the previous ones with more practice,
having an average error of 30 degrees. But things got very intriguing when researchers
look at foragers from the same age colonies. [Music] The researchers found that the first
dancers from same age colonies bees that never had the opportunity to interact with older,
more experienced bees, were very bad at delivering the correct information. They
had an average error of almost 40 degrees when trying to dance for the first time. Some bees
were so bad that they deliver an 65 degrees error, however they got better with time and reduced the
error to around the same level as normal colonies indicating that the waggle dance direction error
was highest in the first dances of naive bees that could not follow experienced wagle dancers.
Interestingly, errors were also found when researchers measured food distance,
food quality, and dance quality as well. Just as modern societies depend on successful educational
systems to stay ahead and functional, honeybees might have also evolved a full educational system
that had yet to be fully comprehended. And I asked Dr James Nieh from the University of
California in San Diego a little bit more about this fascinating research. So here we see the
image of the waggle dancer in the middle and the dance followers that are following it and here's
a video actually showing the bee in the center it's got the white orange dot on its back and
it's being followed by other bees so this is the classic waggle dance now notice that the angle
the B is moving when it's waggling it's about I would say 20 degrees to the left of the vertical
position here's an example of another waggle dance and they're all pointing in the same direction
because they're all being trained and indicating the same food location now these are pretty good
waggle dances notice that each time she's more or less pointed in the correct direction the duration
of the waggle run communicates food distance the farther away the food the longer the waggle run
the direction as I just said points to the direction of the food relative to the Sun
now you see other dancers and notice they're all pointed in about the same direction some of them
are not exactly in the same direction this green one is making some errors but overall on average
they're pointing in the correct direction now in this experiment we found that novices are able to
learn how to dance better from observing other waggle dancers and you can see there are a lot
of painted bees here these are all the bees that we were training and following in our experiment
and this is a fun thing because there's a lot going on so it's good that people can
train themselves on looking for the other dancers so I wanted to mention the amount
of time that they should waggle to communicate distance as I said if they do it incorrectly or
Learn Somehow incorrectly when they're young it appears to persist for their entire lifespan and
this could be a form of cultural Transmission in other words maybe one generation will teach the
next the incorrect distance encoding and I'll go over that in a moment but another reason
that maybe bees need to learn is look at the dance floor so some bees are dancing on this
brood cone that's covered with this fluffy wax some bees are dancing on the open comb we know
that the dance surface influences the accuracy of the dance so is it possible by practicing by
dancing on these different surfaces that they are actually learning to dance better over time that's
something that's an experiment that we hope to to work and explore in Greater detail. [Music]
The article was published in the prestigious Journal of Science. It is a must read article
to everyone but wait there is a little problem the paper is behind a paywall. How delightful.
Thank you prestigious science journal, anyhow, the first author, a true gentleman,
has made the article available to everybody on the research gate website, the link is provided
in the description of this video, thank you Dr Dong. There are many implications regarding
these findings, for example: Do you think pesticides might be damaging their learning
abilities or other things that may perhaps the regulatory systems are not being able to catch?
That's a great point so the the regulation is based largely upon studies of mortality. Do
bees die or not within 48 hours or so of being treated with a pesticide but there are long-term
effects on Survival that we know but whether you live or die is very very coarse way of looking at
it because bees need to communicate and they have a lot of sophisticated behaviors work that I have
done with colleagues in my lab and with students has shown that there are multiple effects on B
behaviors their ability to walk their ability to dance and their ability to learn so many research
researchers have now shown that when bees and these could be stingless bees uh or it could be
honeybees or even other kinds of bees when they receive sub-lethal doses of pesticides meaning
they're not dying right away their cognition is impaired they have a reduced ability to
learn and they have reduced memory and this can happen at any life stage for example larvae that
are fed food by nurse bees that's contaminated with pesticides when they become adults they
can also have poorer learning so in many ways for example we talk about lead and the effects of lead
on human children when they grow up it actually reduces their IQ reduces their ability to learn
very similar to the problem with pesticides. If you want to know more about this research
I interviewed Dr Nieh in my podcast. The episode is already available to everybody and I encourage
you to check it out. Thank you very much Dr Nieh for your time, your research is inspiring. Please
keep doing the things you do, we appreciate it. I would like to thank my patrons for the support
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