The following is a copy of a report (of Sep. 17, 2009) in the daily
newspaper "The National",  published (of all places) in Abu Dhabi (United
Arab Emirates), about the honeybee "dance language" (DL) controversy:
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 Dancing in the dark

Caroline Williams

   - Last Updated: September 17. 2009 9:38PM UAE / September 17. 2009 5:38PM
   GMT

 Researchers believe there are aspects of the bees' dance besides direction
and the duration of the waggle that have not yet been recognised. Gerry
Broome / AP Photo

When Karl von Frisch decoded the secret language of bees in 1946, even he
couldn’t quite believe what he had found. Was it really possible for a
creature with a brain smaller than a pinhead to do something so clever? “It
is conceivable that some people will not believe such a thing. Personally, I
also harboured doubts in the beginning,” he said in his Nobel lecture in
1973.

Countless experiments later, the bee’s waggle dance has become an
established scientific fact. Even schoolchildren are taught that honeybees
dance to tell hive-mates about good food sources. Most researchers have long
since stopped asking whether bees communicate in this way and concentrated
on working out how the dance – among the most sophisticated forms of animal
communication outside of primates – evolved.

In the waggle dance as described by von Frisch, a bee returning from a
plentiful food source heads for one of the hive’s vertical honeycombs, where
it runs in a figure of eight. On the straight part of the run, the bee
buzzes its wings and vibrates its abdomen – the “waggle”. Von Frisch’s
insight was that this middle portion of the dance contains two crucial
pieces of information about the location of food.

First of all, direction is given in relation to the sun’s position. If the
food source can be found by flying directly towards the sun, the middle of
the dance is perfectly vertical. Any angle to the right or left of the sun
is communicated by running at the same angle to the vertical. Distance,
meanwhile, is communicated by the duration of the waggle. The longer the bee
waggles, the further away the food is: about 75 milliseconds is added to the
waggle for every 100 metres. These two pieces of information are what von
Frisch dubbed “the dance language”.

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The dance, which can go on for several minutes, attracts other bees, which
become increasingly excited as they watch the dancer. Once a follower has
observed five or six runs, it leaves the hive and flies directly to the
food, as if by satellite navigation.

Or that is how the story goes. In recent years, some researchers have begun
to suggest that the waggle dance is too good to be true. While they accept
that the dance contains information about the location of food, they argue
that its importance has been massively overstated. A litany of recent
evidence suggests that while bees can follow the dance, they often fail to
decode it properly, or ignore it completely.

“I think the atmosphere is changing,” says Christoph Grüter at the
University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. “People are much more open to the idea
that the dance language is not that important.”

In one study, Dr Grüter and his colleague Walter Farina of the University of
Buenos Aires in Argentina found that among bees that attend to a dance, 93
per cent ignore the instructions and head to a food source they already know
about. Similarly, bees often seem unable to follow the instructions. Some
watch more than 50 runs and make several sorties out of the hive but never
find the food.

The waggle dance also turns out to be much less important to foraging
success than has been suggested. Hives in which the honeycombs are laid
horizontally, preventing the bees from indicating direction properly, don’t
fare any worse than others, except when natural food sources are severely
depleted.

So why hasn’t this been noticed before? Dr Grüter points out that most
waggle dance experiments are carried out in highly unnatural conditions,
using artificial feeders filled with sucrose solution in areas where there
are few natural food sources. While this eliminates the confusion of having
lots of bees dancing about lots of different food sources, it gives an
overly simplistic picture.

Experiments designed to be more like the natural world would give different
results, Dr Grüter says. Several experiments like this have now been done,
and they seem to support the view that under natural conditions, foragers
rarely rely on the dance alone, if at all.

Instead, Dr Grüter and colleagues believe the waggle dance is just one
component of a more complex system for directing foraging. The dance doesn’t
just convey spatial information, they say, it also passes on odour clues and
generally motivates other bees to go foraging. Bees also glean information
by observing their colleagues flying off to gather food.

Dr Grüter says he now sees location information as “back-up”. He has found
that when the dance is the only information available about the location of
a feeder, bees struggle to follow the directions. “If you don’t add scent
[to the feeder] and the bees don’t see other bees foraging, it is extremely
difficult for bees to find the feeders,” he says.

Similarly, Joe Riley, an entomologist from Rothamsted Research in
Hertfordshire, UK, found that of 19 bees that followed directions to an
unscented feeder, only two of them actually found it.“This was in an
environment deliberately chosen to be devoid of food sources other than our
odourless feeders. Using coded location data was their only real option,”
Prof Riley says.

Not everyone is ready to downgrade the importance of the dance language.
Moushumi Sen Sarma and Axel Brockmann of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign argue that there are plenty of studies that show that bees
routinely follow it. “We do not think it is a matter of controversy,” says
Dr Sen Sarma.

What everyone can agree on is that we still don’t understand a crucial
aspect of the waggle dance. Almost all research to date has focused on the
information the dancer imparts. “A communication act is only understood if
we understand what the receiver is doing,” Dr Brockmann says. As the
entomologist Kirk Visscher, of the University of California, Riverside,
points out, different bees might be getting different kinds of information
from the same dance. Some may smell or taste the nectar, some may be able to
see the exact angle of the dance, others may be close enough to translate
the length of the waggle.

Abandoning the neat story of the waggle dance will be difficult. Even so, it
is still amazing to think that an insect can compute direction and distance
accurately and communicate it to other bees. If they choose to ignore that
information – well, so be it.

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From the point of view of DL opponents, the rport is, of course, far too
little, and far too late.

Nonetheless, the mere fact that a daily newspaper anywhere in the world,
dares seriously raise the possibility that the 1973 Nobel Prize
winning claim that honeybees have a "dance language", might be abandoned, is
a welcome, and encouraging sign of a basic change in the scientific
zeitgeist!

-- 
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")

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