The Waggle Dance

Passage A In ancient Greece, Aristotle documented the ability of foraging honeybees to recruit nestmates to a good food source. He did not speculate on how the communication occurred, but he and naturalists since then have observed that a bee that finds a new food source returns to the nest and “dances” bee had discovered. Yet questions still remained regarding the precise mechanism used to transmit that information.

In the 1960s, Wenner and Esch each discovered independently that dancing honeybees emit low-frequency sounds, which we now know to come from wing vibrations. Both researchers reasoned that this might explain the bees’ ability to communicate effectively even in completely dark nests. But at that time many scientists mistakenly believed that honeybees information not from sound, but from odors the forager conveys from the food source.

Yet Gould has shown that foragers can dispatch bees to sites they had not actually visited, something that would not be possible if odor were in fact necessary to bees’ communication. Finally, using a honeybee robot to simulate the forager’s dance, Kirchner and Michelsen showed that sounds an essential role in conveying information about the food’s location.

Passage B All animals communicate in some sense. Bees dance, ants leave trails, some fish emit high-voltage signals. But some species—bees, birds, and primates, for example—communicate symbolically. In an experiment with vervet monkeys in the wild, Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler found that prerecorded vervet alarm calls from a loudspeaker elicited the same call. These responses suggest that each alarm call represents, for vervets, a specific type of predator.

Karl von Frisch was first to crack the code of the honeybee’s dance, which he described as “language.” The dance symbolically represents the distance, direction, and quality of newly discovered food. Adrian Wenner and others believed that bees rely on olfactory cues, as well but this has turned out not to be so.

While it is true that bees have a simple nervous system, they do not automatically follow just any information. Biologist James Gould trained foraging bees to find food in a boat placed in the middle of a lake and then allowed them to return to the hive to indicate this new location. presumably because no pollinating flowers grow in such a place.