How Honeybees Say, "Come and Get It!"

One in every three bites of food you take comes courtesy of a bee. Without their pollination efforts, our diet and our gardens would be, to say the least, boring. In today’s “Beyond the Garden Basics” newsletter/podcast, we talk with Dr. James Nieh, of the School of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego. He and his team have been studying how honeybees communicate with each other, and how their elaborate dance moves are interpreted by the other honeybees in the hive. Basically, if you know where all the good pollen is, shake your booty, and do the Waggle Dance!

Dr. Nieh’s original study can be found in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of Science. A more gardener-friendly version can be read at ModernFarmer.com. Or, listen to the podcast (above) or read the transcript!

TRANSCRIPT - How Honeybees Say, “Come and Get It!”

Farmer Fred  0:00  

Have you heard about the Waggle Dance? No, it's not an obscure Chubby Checker record from the 1960s. Nor is it the follow up to the Soupy Sales song, “Do the Mouse”. The Waggle Dance is something bees do. And it's how they communicate to their hive mates, the other bees, telling them where the good stuff is, where the pollen is, and how to get there. iI’s a very elaborate dance. If you're like me, if you're a gardener, and you spend a lot of time in the garden, sometimes you'll just sit down and watch the bees, and wonder: “How the heck did they find these plants?” What is going on in their communication? We're talking to a gentleman who has studied this for a living. He and fellow scientists have an article published in the Journal of Science, and it's all about the Waggle Dance and how they discovered it. We're talking with Dr. James Nieh. He's the Associate Dean School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He's a professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution. And I always like talking to university bee specialists, because they seem to have a fun job. And it sounds like you have a very interesting job. I don't know how you get the bees to slow down long enough to study their dance. 

Dr. James Nieh  1:14  

Thank you, Fred. It's a pleasure to talk to you. We actually don't have them stand still. We watch them as they're in motion. But you're right, it sometimes can be a challenge to move with the bees, as they're dancing. 

Farmer Fred

So let's talk about the whole thrust of your paper. And if people want to read more about it, there's a very good explanation that you wrote for  the March 2023 edition of Modern Farmer magazine and website. It’s called “Unlocking Secrets of the Honeybee Dance Language.” What was your impetus for studying this? 

Dr. James Nieh  1:45  

One of the things we wanted to learn is, why is it that some animals, like human beings, songbirds, and naked mole-rats, why do they have to learn language? We know that other animals, many of them are actually born with the ability to have a perfect animal communication system or animal language without the need for learning. That is what actually motivated us to look at honey bees, because honey bees have a very sophisticated animal language. And we suspect because it is so complicated, that learning might be involved. 

Farmer Fred  2:18  

And we have known for a few decades that bees do communicate by movement, haven't we? 

Dr. James Nieh  2:24  

Yes, that's right. In fact, it was something that Aristotle even suspected thousands of years ago. Although if you look at the translation, there's a little bit of uncertainty if he knew about the Waggle Dance. But some historians of science say that he did. And it really is a Waggle Dance, it is a shake your booty. But what is amazing is the amount of information that is communicated via a bee to the fellow bees about where the pollen is, and how to get there. It's truly remarkable. And it's the most complex example of animal language that communicates something like location that we know of. 

Farmer Fred  3:01  

And also according to your paper, the movement also reveals the quality of a pollen resource. 

Dr. James Nieh  3:06  

That's right. When bees are repeating this figure-eight motion multiple times, the more times they repeat it, the higher the quality of the resource. And there are two motions, there's the waggle phase, if you imagine the bee as a little arrow, she's running forward with her head pointed forward, and her abdomen is waggling. So that's called the waggle run because she's running while waggling. And then there's something called the return phase where she's returning back in a semicircle. And that creates one half of the figure eight. And that return phase is faster, the more excited she is about the food. So it's almost as if she's more eager to come back and do more Waggles. 

Farmer Fred  3:45  

And is this just happening at the hive? Anybody who's sat for a while and watched bees at work, they'll sometimes think, “oh my goodness, I'm going to be stung. Look at that bee as it's going after that pollen. It’s shaking its behind at me, like it's getting its sting, getting ready to come at me.” But they're just communicating. 

Dr. James Nieh  4:07  

They would normally do this only at the nest. And it's true that they can sometimes do it, especially when the nest is crowded, on the outside of the nest. So if you have a standard wood box, kind of on the board standing in front. But typically they're going to be doing it inside the nest, you can see a bee flying around and moving at food sources. But that's not the Waggle Dance. That's something very different. 

Farmer Fred  4:28  

Oh, maybe the are gonna sting me after all. By the way, let's figure out the sex of bees here that do go out foraging. Are they females or males? 

Dr. James Nieh  4:38  

All the bees that are foraging or doing any work at all are females. The males only have one job, and when that job is done, they die. 

Farmer Fred  4:45  

Oh, okay. Sad life but no. The Waggle Dance and the intricacy of their instructions are dependent upon not only being born with some of that knowledge, but also learning tips from others.

Dr. James Nieh  4:49  

That's right, the honeybees in a colony we discovered are actually learning how to dance from older and more experienced honey bees.

Farmer Fred  5:10  

That's great. As long as, I guess, there are older bees around. You've done experiments where you have isolated the bees from the older generation. 

Dr. James Nieh  5:18  

That's right. And it's very interesting. Honeybees have a division of labor, meaning that they do different jobs depending on how old they are. When honeybees first emerged as adults, they start off as nurse bees, you're taking care of the larvae, and also the queen. Then, as they get older into their teenage days, you might say, because they don't live for years, they live for about 35-45 days, they start taking out the trash and building the comb, doing chores around the house. And then finally, when they get older, they start to work as a guard bee. And as a forager. And of course as a forager, then they start to Waggle Dance. So the key is, if you start out with a colony that's created only with day-old bees, they are all the same age, and then they're going to march through this progression of jobs with each other. So they really have no opportunity to observe Waggle dancers because no one in the colony is of Waggle dancing age. 

Farmer Fred

So I would imagine that group wasn't very successful. 

Dr. James Nieh

They actually were able to produce Waggle dances that we could definitely recognize. But in comparison to control colonies that had the same number of bees, but they had bees of all ages, and therefore they could observe and did observe other bees before they first danced. The experimental colonies were the ones that only had young bees, they could never watch older bees dance. And they had three problems in the way they danced. The first is …

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