Honey bee foragers dance to communicate the spatial location of food and other resources to their nestmates. This remarkable communication system has long served as an important model system for studying mechanisms and evolution of complex behavior. I provide a broad synthesis of recent research on dance communication, concentrating on the areas that are currently the focus of active research. Specific issues considered are as follows: (a) the sensory and integrative mechanisms underlying the processing of spatial information in dance communication, (b) the role of dance communication in regulating the recruitment of workers to resources in the environment, (c) the evolution of the dance language, and (d) the adaptive fine-tuning of the dance for efficient spatial communication.

The biology of the dance language.

Phylogenetic analysis of honey bee behavioral evolution.

East Asia is home to at least 9 indigenous species of honey bee. These bees are extremely valuable because they are key pollinators of about 1/3 of crop species, provide significant income to some of the world's poorest people, and are prey items for some endemic vertebrates. Furthermore, Southeast Asian Dipterocarp forests appear to be adapted to pollination by honey bees. Thus long-term decline in honey bee populations may lead to significant changes in the pollinator ecology of these forests, exacerbating the more direct effects of deforestation and wood harvesting on forest health. Although complete extinction of any honey bee species is seen as unlikely, local extinction is likely to occur across extensive areas. The most significant threats to local honey bee populations are deforestation and excessive hunting pressure. Conservation of East Asian honey bees requires immediate action to determine what rate of colony harvesting by honey hunters is sustainable. This requires information on the demography of hunted populations, particularly the intrinsic growth rates and the rates of harvest.

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Conservation of Asian honey bees

Karl von Frisch published “Die Tanze der Bienen” in 1946, which demonstrated that successful honey bee foragers perform a stereotyped dance to communicate the location of valuable resources to her nestmates. This discovery proved to be the starting point of many areas of investigation. Here I review some recent advancement in our understanding of the waggle dance.

The dance legacy of Karl von Frisch

Honey bees (Apis sp.) are the only known bee genus that uses nest-based communication to provide nest-mates with information about the location of resources, the so-called “dance language.” Successful foragers perform waggle dances for high quality food sources and suitable nest-sites during swarming. However, since many species of social insects do not communicate the location of resources to their nest-mates, the question of why the dance language evolved is of ongoing interest. We review recent theoretical and empirical research into the ecological circumstances that make dance communication beneficial in present day environments. This research suggests that the “dance language” is most beneficial when food sources differ greatly in quality and are hard to find. The dances of extant honey bee species differ in important ways, and phylogenetic studies suggest an increase in dance complexity over time: species with the least complex dance were the first to appear and species with the most complex dance are the most derived. We review the fossil record of honey bees and speculate about the time and context (foraging vs. swarming) in which spatially referential dance communication might have evolved. We conclude that there are few certainties about when the “dance language” first appeared; dance communication could be older than 40 million years and, thus, predate the genus Apis, or it could be as recent as 20 million years when extant honey bee species diverged during the early Miocene. The most parsimonious scenario assumes it evolved in a sub-tropical to temperate climate, with patchy vegetation somewhere in Eurasia.

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Why, when and where did honey bee dance communication evolve?

SummaryThe wagtail dance of Apis florea is performed on that section of the tope of the comb which faces in the direction of the wagtail run of the dance. If the dancing bee had a direct view of the sky, the wagtail dances pointed approximately in the direction of the feeding place, on average 6·2° to the right of it (SD = ± 15°). Without direct sight of the sky, A. florea also performed wagtail dances oriented towards the feeding place, on average 4·4° to the right of it (SD = ± 25°).When bees saw the sky through a mirror, they danced in one of two directions. The first seemed to be the direction of the image of the feeding place in the mirror, and the second the opposite direction (180° from the first).

N. Koeniger

Papers

Observations and Experiments on Dance Communication in Apis Florea in Sri Lanka