Hey there, young explorer! Get ready to dive into the fascinating world of honeybees and their secret language. Did you know that honeybees communicate with each other in a way that is similar to how humans use words? It’s true! In fact, their dance language is one of the most complicated forms of nonhuman communication.

Scientists have been curious about why some animals, including humans, need to learn a language instead of being born with it. To find answers, a group of biologists, have been studying honeybee communication for many years. They recently published a paper in a journal called Science, where we shared our exciting discoveries.

Important Details

• Let’s start by talking about the amazing “waggle dance.” Honeybees use this dance to show their fellow bees where to find important resources like food, water, or a new home for their colony. The waggle dance tells other bees the direction, distance, and quality of the resource. It’s like a special dance code!
• Imagine a bee waggling its abdomen while moving in a figure eight pattern. By circling around, the bee gives clues about the direction and distance to the resource. Other bees follow the dancer closely to learn where to go. The longer the waggle run, the farther away the resource is. And the angle of the waggle communicates the direction.
• But here’s the tricky part: performing the waggle dance isn’t easy. The dancing bee has to remember the correct angle, duration, and do all this in total darkness, surrounded by buzzing bees and uneven surfaces. It’s like dancing in the dark while trying to give accurate directions!
• Sometimes bees make mistakes while dancing. They might point in the wrong direction or signal the wrong distance. These mistakes can make it harder for other bees to find the resource. Scientists wanted to understand how bees learn to dance and if they learn from experienced dancers.
• To find out, they conducted an experiment. They created two groups of bee colonies. In one group, the bees could observe and learn from experienced dancers. But in the other group, the bees couldn’t see any dances because they were all the same age. They wanted to see if the bees that couldn’t observe dances would still be able to dance correctly.
• Guess what we discovered? The bees that had experienced dancers to learn from produced dances with fewer mistakes. They learned from their teachers and became better dancers themselves. This was the first time researchers found such complex social learning in insects. Bees are born with some dance knowledge, but they can improve it by following experienced dancers.
• But here’s the coolest part: bees have different dance dialects! Just like people from different places have different accents or ways of speaking, honeybees from different colonies have their own unique dance styles. The distance they communicate through their waggle dance varies depending on where they live and find food.
• The bees that couldn’t observe dances early on never corrected their distance errors. They kept communicating greater distances than they should. Scientists think that each colony has its own dance dialect, and bees learn it from experienced dancers. But the bees in our experiment didn’t have teachers, so they developed their own unique dance dialect.
• Isn’t that amazing? Bees have their own cultures and ways of passing knowledge down from older bees to younger ones. The study opens up a whole new world of understanding about how animals learn and communicate.
• We hope this adventure into the honeybee dance language has sparked your curiosity. Who knows what other secrets these tiny creatures hold? Keep exploring and asking questions, our curious readers! There’s so much more to discover about the wonders of nature.

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Watch a video

Observe David Pogue as he acquires the ability to communicate like a bee and engages in the captivating waggle dance.