[EDLING:1769] RE: Language of the Bees

[Martin Edwardes]

I think Karl von Frisch's Nobel prize is still safe. See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4536127.stm  and
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67494,00.html for the latest
news on waggle-dance research. As far as I know there has been nothing
disproving this research, which supports von Frisch's conclusions. The paper
is in Nature, 12 May 2005, pp205-207. This site lets you see the bees
dancing the night away: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bees/danceswagg.html

There has long been incredulity that bees, with their small brains, can do
this trick, but it is only a genetic response to a signalling need. Bees are
eusocial, and eusocial animals need a mechanism to make that eusociality
work. Bees have the waggle dance, wasps have socialisation pheromones, and
termites and ants have a vocabulary of pheromones for socialisation,
warning, and co-ordinating food exploitation; and they all use
touch-signalling, too. Why are the bees different? Because their food
sourcing is different. Wasps are opportunistic hunters with no need to guide
sisters to food, termites and ants are non-flyers who can lay chemical
trails on surfaces, but bees are flying nectar and pollen farmers. Bumble
bees don't have a waggle dance, each bee discovers its own food sources; but
their nests are small, tens rather than thousands of sisters. Honey bees
need a way of maximally exploiting any available resources efficiently, and
the waggle dance does this. Nothing weird, the bees who had a rudimentary
dance did better that those without a dance, and this created a Darwinian
runaway effect that only stopped when it ran into the buffers of the size of
an individual bee brain (so it stopped fairly quickly, then ...)

There is often confusion about the symbolic nature of the waggle dance. It
think it is best answered as follows. Yes, the waggle dance itself, as an
evolutionary event, is arbitrary - it could have developed in any number of
ways, there is nothing inherent in this particular dance that makes it
better than another dance. But at the level of the individual bee, the dance
is completely non-arbitrary. The bee can only mean one thing by a particular
dance combination - this distance, this direction. The size of the resource
cannot be indicated, nor can its vertical position (von Frisch ran an
elegant experiment that proved this pretty conclusively - I can give more
details if you want them). The Bee waggle dance is not a symbolic signal, it
isn't even an arbitrary signal, it's just a simple way of maximising food
collection for the nest.

The interesting question about the waggle dance is not "does it mean
something?" or "does it work?" but "what keeps it truthful?" If you can
trust the signals you receive but conspecifics can't trust your signals, you
have access to their knowledge and they have no access to yours. In
evolutionary terms you win, your genes pass Go and collect another
generation. But you also have a recipe for truthful signals to disappear
from the species repertoire. Using this argument, I personally think it is
the sterility of eusocial insects that keeps their signals trustworthy and
allowed them to develop a level of complexity.

Hope this helps.

Martin Edwardes
http://www.btinternet.com/~martin.edwardes/


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-edling at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
[mailto:owner-edling at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of Tamara Warhol
Sent: 11 August 2006 16:26
To: edling at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Subject: [EDLING:1768] Language of the Bees


Hi Guys,

Recently someone told me that they had disproved that bees communicate 
with each other through the waggle dance.  Does anyone know if this is true?

-Tamara