The renowned waggle dance of honey bees is a method they employ to inform their hive mates of a profitable food source they have discovered. This dance encompasses various aspects that signify the food's distance, flight direction, and quality. Even though the bees integrate these components to convey useful and relatively intricate data to other foragers within the hive, experts have verified that honey bees hone their dance proficiency by observing their peers.
Experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) and UC San Diego have witnessed the process of a thriving forager bee as it comes back to the hive and executes a waggle dance to convey that it has discovered a beneficial pollen, nectar, or water resource. The dance conveys relevant data regarding the presence, caliber, identity, direction, and distance of the source to enable other members of the colony to detect and exploit it.
The recent research involved introducing a group of bees that were only one-day old into five experimental hives. Some of these hives contained forager bees that engaged in waggle dances, while others did not have such bees. The experts kept an eye on the introduced group until they began displaying their own waggle dance behavior, and then evaluated how effective it was.
The scientists monitored the experimental hives until they saw the first waggle dances from the bees, and then checked back 20 days later when the bees had more experience in foraging and dancing. They discovered that young bees who had previously observed other bees doing waggle dances were more skilled at performing the behavior themselves. On the other hand, bees that had not witnessed any dances before their first attempt produced more chaotic dances with bigger mistakes in the waggle angle and wrong distance calculation. However, as the same bees grew older and had more experience in dancing and following, they were able to decrease angle errors and produce more structured dances.
The findings suggest that waggle-dance behavior is not solely determined by genetic programming. While bees have an inherent understanding of how to execute the various elements of the dance, their abilities improve and become more polished as they learn from their peers. This is significant because the intricate communication method can help foraging bees conserve their time and energy by enabling them to fly straight to a resource instead of having to hunt for it in the surrounding area.
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