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What the Buzz is All About
by Alex Hawes

In the 1920s, an Austrian zoologist named Karl von Frisch embarked upon what became a lifelong passion for spying on bees. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his discovery and description of the honeybee's food dance, perhaps the most celebrated example of animal communication in the wild. Von Frisch, while at the University of Munich, created special beehives with glass windows, permitting him to look in on the happenings of the hive. What he witnessed was a system of communication between individual "field worker" bees and the rest of the hive colony so precise that it conveyed the exact location, and desirability, of sources of pollen, nectar, and water, outside of the hive.

Bees live in total darkness while inside the hive. They also are virtually deaf. Therefore, touch, not sight or sound, is the principal sense they rely upon to communicate with other individuals. Worker bees, von Frisch observed, perform either circular or figure-eight dances upon returning to the hive from a find. As it turns out, circular dances communicate to adjacent bees the location of sources of food less than about one hundred yards away. Figure-eight dances, in which bees "waggle" their bodies with varying intensity (causing von Frisch to label the dance "Schwanteltanzen," or "waggle-dance"), relay locations over a hundred yards--and up to several miles--from the hive.

Dances are performed on the vertical plane of the interior hive. The angle of the dance relative to the vertical hive wall indicates the angle of the food source in relation to the sun's position in the sky. Dances directed upward mean the food is straight in the direction of the sun, while dances directed downward indicate the opposite direction, with intermediate angles corresponding to change in direction away from this plane. As the day progresses, the angle of the dance for a given location must then adjust to the sun's movement in the sky. The duration of the dance, as well as the total number of "waggles," appears to relate to the specific distance from the hive to the food location, while the "vigor" of the dance communicates the desirability of this food to the hive. The scent from the worker's find serves to define the food source to others.

Not surprisingly, many scientists viewed von Frisch's reports with skepticism. How could insects with such tiny brains communicate with such specificity? Researchers in more recent years have put the bees' abilities to the test. One of the most imaginative efforts was the development of a "mechanical bee," a life-sized, brass robot covered with bee's wax, whose movements and sounds can be controlled remotely. Of course, a bee robot can never be completely life-like; it cannot, for example, react to the tactile touch of others, and, as a result, often bulldozes into its unamused bee colleagues. Thomas Seeley, a bee expert from Cornell University, half-jokingly estimates the effectiveness of the various robot imposters at about two percent.

However, research employing mechanical bees, as well as other experimental techniques, has enabled scientists to establish the accuracy of bee communication. Though the bees' communicatory system is certainly not perfect, experimenters have found that the insects are generally accurate to within 20 degrees in direction, and within 15 percent of the total distance, in pinpointing a food source's location.

Researchers have also found that honeybee dance is far from automatic. Dancing, rather, is contingent upon the audience. The hive community has a variety of mutual needs, which include a reliable supply of pollen, nectar, and water. Worker field bees can assess the rate of each "commodity" being brought into the hive, and then search for the commodity that seems in short supply. If a bee returns with information about a superfluous food type, it will not perform the location dance. In fact, returning workers do their dance only about 10 percent of the time. "The bee is integrating many variables," Seeley contends. The bee is thinking, one might say.

Furthermore, bees in the hive can exert their own decision-making processes upon hearing of food source locations. In one widely discussed anecdote, bee researchers James and Carol Gould performed an experiment in which they presented nectar to several bees in a rowboat in the middle of a lake. The bees returned to the hive with the scent and location of their discovery, but no other workers came back to take advantage of this sugary treasure. Apparently, the bees in the hive had a mental map of their surroundings, on the basis of which they chose to ignore the message. After all, how could there possibly be pollen or nectar in the middle of a lake? (Seeley points out, though, that the bees could conceivably have responded at first, but then turned back at first sight of the lake, unbeknownst to the Goulds in the boat). Yet, as the rowboat was positioned closer and closer to shore, more and more bees appeared in response.

Results from this and other studies indicate both flexibility and intentionality in bee communication--two important indicators of complex cognition (see Mindful of Thought). Seeley is quick to caution, however, that there is no syntactical element to this communication, and in that sense it is quite straightforward. "[The notion of] dance-language is very misleading," states Seeley. There is also no evidence of learning or teaching in this system; the waggle-dance is seemingly innate.

Bees are nonetheless communicating information while spatially and temporally removed from the food stimulus. In contrast, the highly touted alarm calls of various primates, rodents, and birds (see primate language for discussion), despite demonstrating "semantic" object representation, are given immediately, while in sight of the stimulus (the predator). "Flexible, versatile communication is not a mammalian monopoly," concludes Seeley. Next to humans, honeybees in fact appear superior in their communicatory complexity to all other animals studied by researchers. Quite a stinging indictment indeed.

 (ZooGoer 24(6) 1995. Copyright 1995 Alex Hawes. All rights reserved.)

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