by Stephan Foianini
figures by Gracyn Mose
When you think of a beehive, what comes to mind? You may imagine an industrial factory with countless bees toiling away, tirelessly collecting and processing honey. However, what if I told you that a beehive is more like a night club than a sweatshop? The hive is dark, loud, coated in a sweet-sticky substance, and, most importantly, everyone inside is dancing! When a bee finds a promising source of food, such as nectar from a flower, she will fly back to the hive and perform a precise and sophisticated figure-eight dance called the waggle dance. This dance isn’t just random movement; it’s a detailed set of instructions that the bees use to communicate.
It was historically believed that these and other behaviors found in social insects were entirely innate and that the individual animals were born knowing how to perform the behaviors correctly. However, recent studies have revealed that novice honeybees perform better and more accurate dances if they have previously observed more experienced bees performing the dance.
Bee Communication: The discovery of the waggle dance
The decoding and interpretation of the waggle dance were significant milestones in ethology, which is the study of animal behavior. Karl von Frisch, an Austrian ethologist, was the pioneering scientist who deciphered this complex form of bee communication in the mid-20th century. Through meticulous experiments, von Frisch demonstrated that bees could communicate the precise location of a food source. These findings were revolutionary since they challenged the notion that complex forms of communication were reserved solely for certain mammals, such as humans. His work not only deepened our understanding of animal behaviors but also earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, highlighting the profound impact of his research on the scientific community.
So how does the waggle dance work? When a forager bee finds a promising source of food, she will fly back to the hive and perch herself on one of the vertical wax combs of the hive. There, she will proceed to perform the waggle dance to her sisters. This dance has two steps: a central “waggle run,” followed by alternating left and right semicircles that return the bee to the starting point (Figure 1). The dance communicates exact and quantifiable measurements that allow other bees to precisely locate the food. Neighboring bees will approach and carefully observe the dance as it’s repeated multiple times, while maintaining the same direction and duration. Once they’ve observed several cycles, the neighboring bees will leave the hive and find the exact same source of food that the original forager found.
This decoding of the waggle dance was important because it showed that honeybees, despite their simplicity, can communicate precise information using abstract concepts. It was also one of the first major breakthroughs in understanding how another species communicates.
Bees Are Born to (Waggle) Dance… But They Get by With a Little Help from Their Friends
Although these findings were published almost a hundred years ago, new insights and discoveries surrounding honeybee communication are still being investigated to this day. Scientists are now trying to better understand if complex social behaviors, like the waggle dance, are entirely innate or if learning is involved.
It was historically believed that most, if not all, behaviors in insects were innate and hardwired into the genes of the animal, and that any sophisticated form of learning was found only in larger species with more complex brains. In other words, the insect is born knowing how to perform all its behaviors and functions. However, research published by Dong and colleagues in 2023 suggests that honeybees can improve the precision and accuracy of their waggle dance by observing more experienced bees perform the dance, implying that there is an element of social learning involved in performing the dance properly. This work adds to the growing evidence that complex behaviors, even in insects, are rarely entirely innate.
For this experiment, the researchers created two bee colonies composed of only young bees, which had never performed the waggle dance before. The experimental colony was entirely naïve and had never seen other bees perform the dance. The control colony, also made up of young bees, did have the opportunity to observe experienced bees perform the dance, as is typical in the wild. Young bees from both groups began innately displaying the waggle at 1 to 2 weeks after emerging from the pupae. The control bees performed the waggle dance with the same accuracy as the experienced bees they had previously observed. However, the young bees in the experimental colony performed dances that were riddled with directional and distance errors. The accuracy of their dances was imprecise and varied highly from one cycle of the dance to the next (Figure 2). As these experimental bees aged though, they slowly started to perform the dance better, and after 20 days reached the same level of accuracy as the control bees. The researchers propose that the experimental bees, through experience and by observing their inexperienced sisters, gradually learned to improve. However, this process took much longer than if the young bees had just observed an experienced dancer in the first place.
Implications of Social Learning in Bees
This exciting outcome begs the question: Why must bees learn from others how to correctly perform the waggle dance? One thought that comes to mind is that learning is a way to refine behaviors. Differences in the environment, such as foliage density, may require certain patterns in the waggle to be learned to account for obstacles and other factors. The general steps of the waggle dance behavior may be innately hardwired, but there might be more nuanced steps that need to be socially learned from more experienced dancers, similar to how humans innately start vocalizing at a young age but need the guidance of their parents to learn the intricacies and nuance to actually speak.
In humans, the distinction between learned and innate behaviors is a foundational topic in psychology. Innate behaviors, such as reflexes and basic motor skills, are hardwired and present from birth. These include actions like sucking, grasping, and blinking, which do not require learning or experience. On the other hand, learned behaviors encompass a vast array of activities that humans acquire through experience, observation, and education. Language acquisition, social norms, and problem-solving skills are prime examples of behaviors that are learned rather than innate. This interplay between innate and learned behaviors is crucial for human development and adaptation, much like it appears to be for honeybees. Recognizing that social learning plays a significant role in both insects and humans highlights the importance of the environment and social interactions in shaping behavior. It underscores the value of interdisciplinary research in psychology and ethology to deepen our understanding of learning mechanisms across species.
Stephan Foianini is a sixth-year PhD student in the Molecules, Cells and Organisms program at Harvard University.
Gracyn Mose is a first-year PhD student in the Chemical Biology program at Harvard University.
For more information:
- If interested in learning more about animal behavior and connecting with ethologists, check out The Animal Behavior Society
- For more information on the works of Karl von Frisch, read his Nobel Lecture.
- For a more comprehensive understanding of von Frisch’s work, I highly recommend his book, “Bees: Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language.” It’s a concise yet detailed account of how he decoded the language of bees. You can access the book for free.
- For a more modern perspective on his work and a deeper dive into his biography, Tania Munz’s book, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language,” is an excellent read. You can read the book for free if you have access to HOLLIS.