Hi All

Time to change the thread title I reckon.  This discussion started in the thread 'Natural entrances'.  


My own world view changed when James Nieh and Tom Seeley and their respective colleagues decoded the Stop Signal.  Bees witness something, hold it in their minds, later on see a nestmate communicating something that seems ill-advised, then they interfere with that communication and stop the bee communicating.  It is becoming quite a stretch to call all that instinctive or reflexive behaviour.

James Nieh has long had an interest in the Stop Signal.  In 2010 his group published a study that shows that workers experiencing some difficulty at a feeding site stopped nestmates dancing for that site back in the nest.  

Here's the UCSD press release: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/science/02-09HoneyBees.asp

Tom Seeley and colleagues describe a parallel use of the stop signal in the nest site decision process.  Here, once consensus has been reached among scouts, workers interfere with waggle dances pointing at other sites and thereby more quickly get to a state where the swarm can depart safely.

An abstract is here but the full paper is behind a paywall:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6064/108.abstract

So bees can see a colleague communicating, understand the message, relate the message to an experience of theirs, decide to interfere and put into action the means to stop the communication.  Neat, huh?!

By the way, dance language deniers should have looked away at the start.  Science has moved on.


Gavin


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