<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">There's a new post on <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; "><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">the Web of Language</a></span>:<br><br><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px; white-space: pre; ">Bees do it: bilingual bees teach humans a lesson </span><br><br><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10px; "><p class="blog"><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0002365" mce_href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0002365">Researchers mixing Asian and European honeybees</a> have shown that the bees can learn one another’s language to cooperate in finding food and bringing it back to the hive.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/04/scibees104.xml" mce_href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/04/scibees104.xml">according to<em> the Telegraph,</em></a><em> </em>honeybees can pick up the new lingo even faster than humans.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some think there’s a lesson in this for people as well as bees: if we could learn to speak each other’s languages like the bees do, perhaps we’d get along better, too.</p><p class="blog">Scientists have known for a long time that honeybees communicate by wagging their bodies from side to side and moving at an angle to the sun, then looping back to do it all over again.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobel-prize winning zoologist Karl von Frisch first described the “waggle dance” that scout bees use to show other bees the distance and direction of a food source, which may be as far as 600 meters from the hive.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/04/animalbehaviour.wildlife" mce_href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/04/animalbehaviour.wildlife">The world’s nine different honeybee species</a> use slightly different waggles – analogous to different dialects among humans. <span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p><p class="blog">Now a team of Chinese, German and Australian scientists who introduced two geographically distant honeybee species and their different dialects into the same hive has shown that after interacting for a while, the bees are able to bridge the language barrier as they go about the communal task of gathering food.</p><p class="blog">While entomologists – scientists who study the insect world – see this as a breakthrough in the study of animal communication, etymologists – scholars who study word derivations – have been more reserved in their reactions.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This is not the Rosetta comb by any means,” sniffed the linguist Noam Chomsky.<span mce_style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Maybe bees can dance – and that’s a big maybe," Chomsky added, "because Nureyev they are not – but only people can talk.”</p><p class="blog">read the rest on <a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">the Web of Language</a></p></span><div><br></div><div><br>DB<br><br>____________________<br>Dennis Baron<br>Professor of English and Linguistics<br>Department of English<br>University of Illinois<br>608 S. Wright St.<br>Urbana, IL 61801<br><br>office: 217-244-0568<br>fax: 217-333-4321<br><br><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron">www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron</a><br><br>read the Web of Language:<br><a href="http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage">www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage</a><br><br><br></div></body></html>