Honey move to share. But to do well, they need dance lessons

In the reprobate test scenario, a group of young honeybees figuring out how to forage for food start to dance on their own – but badly.

Things are moving. The honeybee escapes from the hive and encodes loops that help its colonists find food, sometimes miles away. However, the five colonies in the new experiment did not have any major sisters or half-sisters around as a function of comparing correctly moving choreos.

Still, it dances in some ways increased as young people break and sleep day after day, behavioral ecologist James Nieh of the University of California, San Diego. But when he stood at a distance he moved; Apis mellifera without role models never match timing and coding in normal colonies where young bees are trained to forage for adults before they move on.

Only the young colonies thus show social learning, or the lack of it, business to share through dances between honeybees, Nieh and an international team of colleagues on March 10. Science. The bee dance, like language, is both innate and learned, like bird or human communication.

The dance may appear simple in outline, but it is executed in a challenging manner in the expanded cells of the honeycomb. Bees are “running at one body length per second trying to maintain a right angle on the black pitch, surrounded by hundreds of bees collapsing on them,” says Nieh.

Bees and biologists know that some species of bees can learn from others of their kind, some bumblebees even experiencing disease (SN: 2/23/17). But when it comes to dancing, “I think it’s genetics,” Nieh says. I thought this would make football more like chatter, but the innate communications of fences changing colors, for example. Rather, the lab’s bee-driven experiments show a non-human example of “social learning for sophisticated communication,” Nieh says.

An experiment was developed for social learning. At an apiary research center in Kunming, China, researchers placed nearly 1,000 adult honeybees (shown in purple in the scene) in incubators, and then collected the winged adults as they emerged.

These young people entered the five unfortunate colonies most crowded with new workers of the same age. Both queens of the colony, which would lay eggs after giving birth, will not leave the colony for forage. The food was a labor force from the youth, none older than the experienced foragers humming and dancing in the fields of flowers.

In the dances they moved, and the foraging bees dominate, and not only moving the baggage of the beehive, but fanning the dance. The cell should be empty. “It’s just hanging on the edges to…. It’s easy to get offended,” Nieh says. Unlike commercial bees with uniform honeycombs, natural combs are very irregular, he says. “They take something crazy and rough around the edges.”

Dancing on these tricky surfaces compliments the direction of the food at an angle the dancing moves along the ridge (measured according to gravity). The duration of the mowing gives a sense of how far the bonanza is.

Five of the shipwrecked colonies were left to dance by themselves, while the other five colonies were left in a mixed natural apiary. In the experiments, the researchers first developed and developed a colony of five bees from each hive.

Even in hives of mixed age, angle dancers are not always perfect. The ends in a set of six wall runs are slightly more than 30 degrees apart. Stomach cast off, but much heavier at first. Two of the five corners of the dancers are projected more than 50 degrees apart, and one poor bee repeats more than 60 degrees in six.

As the castaways experience more, however, they succeed in becoming better. Repeating the test with the same marked bees a few weeks later, near the end of their life, he found them wandering as well as the dancers in the normal hive.

What wrecks didn’t change much were the features of the dance that was far away from the food. The researchers set up the hives so that everyone would have the same experience of flying to the foraging area. They continued, however, in dancing as if the bees had been driven away.

They gave more detours to run through the hives (closer to five days) than bees from mixed age hives (more like 3.5 moves). Young people also run longer in each.

The study of this type of foraging is evidence “indeed, the cumulative importance of learning (both individual and social) in the complex behavior of bees,” says insect ecophysiologist Tamar Keasar of the University of Haifa in Israel in an email. In his work, the bees learn to extract food from a colorful flower. They are not bees, little automatons with wings.