Waggle dance
Encyclopedia
Beekeeping
Beekeeping is the maintenance of honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, by humans. A beekeeper keeps bees in order to collect honey and other products of the hive , to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers...
and ethology
Ethology
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee
Honey bee
Honey bees are a subset of bees in the genus Apis, primarily distinguished by the production and storage of honey and the construction of perennial, colonial nests out of wax. Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis...
. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive
Beehive
A beehive is a structure in which bees live and raise their young.Beehive may also refer to:Buildings and locations:* Bee Hive, Alabama, a neighborhood in Alabama* Beehive , a wing of the New Zealand Parliament Buildings...
mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations. Thus the waggle dance is a mechanism whereby successful foragers can recruit other bees in their colony to good locations for collecting various resources. It was once thought that bees had two distinct recruitment dances — round dances and waggle dances — the former for indicating nearby targets and the latter for indicating distant targets, but it is now known that a round dance is simply a waggle dance with a very short waggle run (see below). Austrian ethologist
Ethology
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch
Karl von Frisch
Karl Ritter von Frisch was an Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz....
was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.The dance is said to be a way of communicating.
However further research has called into question the degree to which the dance actually communicates information, as it would seem that relatively few bees pay attention to the information contained in the dance.
Description
The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the patch of flowers being advertised by the dancing bee. Flowers located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase, with a rate of increase of about 75 milliseconds per 100 meters.
Waggle dancing bees that have been in the hive for an extended time adjust the angles of their dances to accommodate the changing direction of the sun. Therefore, bees that follow the waggle run of the dance are still correctly led to the food source even though its angle relative to the sun has changed.
The consumption of ethanol
Ethanol
Ethanol, also called ethyl alcohol, pure alcohol, grain alcohol, or drinking alcohol, is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid. It is a psychoactive drug and one of the oldest recreational drugs. Best known as the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, it is also used in thermometers, as a...
by foraging bees has been shown to reduce waggle dance activity and increase occurrence of the tremble dance
Tremble dance
A tremble dance is a dance performed by forager honey bees of the species Apis mellifera to recruit more receiver honey bees to collect nectar from the workers...
.
When scientists placed a dead Apis mellifera bee on flowers they discovered that bees performed far fewer waggle dances upon returning to their nest. This is likely to be because they associate the dead bee with the presence of a predator on the flower and so it is better for other bees to not forage there.
Though first decoded by Karl von Frisch, dancing behavior in bees had been observed and described multiple times prior. Around 100 years before Frisch's discovery, Nicholas Unhoch described dancing behavior of bees as being an indulgence “in certain pleasures and jollity”. He did, however, admit ignorance as to purpose of the dancing. 35 years before that, Ernst Spitzner observed bees dancing and interpreted it as transmitting forage resource odors to other nestmates. Even Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, in addition to describing flower constancy
Flower constancy
Flower constancy or pollinator constancy is defined as the tendency of individual pollinators to exclusively visit certain flower species or morphs within a species, bypassing other available flower species that could potentially be more rewarding...
behavior, suspected that some form of communication occurred between foragers within a nest:
"On each trip the bee does not fly from a flower of one kind to a flower of another, but flies from one violet, say, to another violet, and never meddles with another flower until it has got back to the hive; on reaching the hive they throw off their load, and each bee on her return is followed by three or four companions. What it is that they gather is hard to see, and how they do it has not been observed".
Jürgen Tautz also writes about it in his book "The Buzz about Bees":
Page 112: Many elements of the communication used to recruit miniswarms to feeding sites are also observed in "true" swarming behavior. Miniswarms of foragers are not placed under the same selection pressure as are true swarms, because the fate of the entire colony is not at stake. A truly swarming colony has to be quickly led to a new home, or it will perish. The behavior used to recruit to food sources possibly developed from the "true" swarming behavior.
Tautz,J.: The Buzz about Bees - Biology of a Superorganism (photos by H. R. Heilmann) Springer Heidelberg & Berlin, 2008
Controversy
The Dance Language vs. The Waggle DanceThe dance language, as defined by von Frisch, is the information about direction, distance, and quality of a resource (such as food or nesting sites) contained within the waggle dance. Karl von Frisch named the dance language “Tanzsprache” in his native tongue.
Though von Frisch insisted on the direct connection between the dance language and the waggle dance, recent criticism holds that potential foragers need not correctly translate the dance language from the waggle dance to successfully forage.
In an experiment on the honeybee Apis mellifera, most individuals who thoroughly followed a waggle dance ignored the resource direction and location information. Instead, 93% of the foragers returned to foraging areas they had previous knowledge of.
Bees that follow a waggle dance can successfully forage without decoding the dance language information in several ways:
- Dance follower may use olfactory information from the dancer and find either the same resource or a different one with a similar scent.
- Following a dance may simply trigger foraging behavior. A forager may then search randomly for resources.
- Following a dance may reactivate private knowledge of a resource. After reactivation, the forager may return the known resource.
- Using information communicated in the waggle dance is more useful to foragers when private information about resources is lacking.
The use of the word “language” may lead to misrepresentations of the waggle dance. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
proposed a system of language a sign is made up two chief components. The signifier is the physical or phonetic representation of a sign. The signified is the conceptual component. If the dance language followed the Saussurian dyadic model of semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, the signifier would be the waggle dance and the signified would be the location of the foraging resource. Though the dance language may or may not follow this sort of pattern, it is not considered to be a language with syntactical grammar or a set of symbols.
Efficiency and Adaptation
The waggle dance may be less efficient than once thought. Some bees observe over 50 waggle runs without successfully foraging, while others will forage successfully after observing 5 runs.
The waggle dance may be adaptive in some environments and not in others. In temperate habitats, honey bee colonies routinely perform the waggle dance, but can still successfully forage when the dance is experimentally obscured. In tropical habitats, honey bee foraging is severely impaired if waggle dancing is prevented. This is thought to be due to the patchiness of resources in tropical environment versus the homogeneity of resources in temperate environments. In the tropics, food resources can come in the form of flowering trees which are rich in nectar but sparsely scattered and bloom for short periods of time. Thus, in tropical zones information about forage location might be more valuable than in temperate zones.
Evolution
Ancestors to modern honeybees most likely performed excitatory movements to encourage other nestmates to forage. These excitatory movements include shaking, zig-zagging, buzzing and crashing into nestmates. Similar behavior is observed in other Hymenoptera including stingless bees, wasps, bumblebees and ants.The waggle dance is thought to have evolved to aid in communicating information about a new nest site, rather than spatial information about foraging sites.
Observations have suggested that different species of honeybees have different "dialects" of the waggle dance, each species or subspecies dance varying by curve or duration. A recent study demonstrated that a mixed colony of Asiatic honeybees (Apis cerana
Apis cerana
Apis cerana, or the Asiatic honey bee , is a species of honey bee found in southern and southeastern Asia, such as China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea. This species is the sister species of Apis koschevnikovi, and both are in the same subgenus as the Western honey...
cerana) and European honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) were gradually able to understand one another's 'dialects' of waggle dance.
Applications to operations research
In line with recent work in swarm intelligenceSwarm intelligence
Swarm intelligence is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence...
research involving optimization algorithms inspired by the behavior of social insects (including bees, ants and termites), and vertebrates such as fish and birds, there has recently been research on using bee waggle dance behavior for efficient fault-tolerant routing. From the abstract of Wedde, Farooq, and Zhang (2004):
In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm, BeeHive, which has been inspired by the communicative and evaluative methods and procedures of honey bees. In this algorithm, bee agents travel through network regions called foraging zones. On their way their information on the network state is delivered for updating the local routing tables. BeeHive is fault tolerant, scalable, and relies completely on local, or regional, information, respectively. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that BeeHive achieves a similar or better performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Another bee-inspired stigmergic computational technique
Stigmergy
Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent...
called bee colony optimization is employed in Internet Server Optimization.
The Zigbee
ZigBee
ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level communication protocols using small, low-power digital radios based on an IEEE 802 standard for personal area networks. Applications include wireless light switches, electrical meters with in-home-displays, and other consumer and industrial...
RF protocol is named after the waggle dance.
See also
- Animal communicationAnimal communicationAnimal communication is any behavior on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behaviour of another animal. The study of animal communication, is sometimes called Zoosemiotics has played an important part in the...
- Bee learning and communicationBee learning and communicationHoney bees learn and communicate in order to find food sources and for other means.-Learning:Learning is essential for efficient foraging. Honey bees are unlikely to make many repeat visits if a plant provides little in the way of reward...
- Tremble danceTremble danceA tremble dance is a dance performed by forager honey bees of the species Apis mellifera to recruit more receiver honey bees to collect nectar from the workers...
- Grooming danceGrooming danceA grooming dance, grooming invitation dance or shaking dance is a dance performed by honeybees to initiate allogrooming. It was first reported in 1945 by biologist Mykola H. Hadak. An increase in the frequency of the grooming dance has been observed among the bees of mite-infested colonies, and...
External links
- Waggle Dance Infographic - VetSci
- Communication and Recruitment to Food Sources by Apis mellifera — USDAUnited States Department of AgricultureThe United States Department of Agriculture is the United States federal executive department responsible for developing and executing U.S. federal government policy on farming, agriculture, and food...
-ARS (accessed 2005-03) - Honeybee Communication — Kimball's Biology Pages (accessed 2005-09)