Young bees go to school to refine the dance with which they signal food sources to their mates: this first example of social learning in insects is documented by a study published in Science by researchers at the University of California at San Diego and the Academy science Chinese.
The so-called ‘wobble dance’ is a sophisticated form of communication that bees use to represent to their mates the distance, direction and quality of food sources, all crucial information for the survival of the colony. Until now it was commonly believed that this dance was an innate behavior that bees show from a certain age onwards, but thanks to this new study it has been understood that this is not quite the case.
The researchers recreated a hive made up entirely of young bees that had reached the right age for their first dance but never got to observe it from older, more experienced bees. The footage demonstrates that these fledgling dancers “move much messier and encode distance incorrectly,” the study authors explain. technique, but they still fail to correctly code the distance of the food: a gap that they carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Thus, learning to dance for bees is comparable to learning to speak for humans. The coding of the distance of the food source is like a sort of dialect which, according to the researchers, is influenced by the environment surrounding the hive and is therefore passed down by the bees that form the colony.
Source: Ansa
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