ABSTRACT
Austrian researcher Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the honeybees’ unique symbolic communication system. He was honoured for his investigations, spanning several years, into the honeybee dance language, which he summarized in his classic work ‘The orientation and the dance language of honeybees’ published in 1967. The fact that honeybees as non-primate species can possess a symbolic language and transmit information concerning distance, quality and direction is the most outstanding example of a sophisticated form of referential communication and resulted in a large number of scientists studying the dance language. Subsequent studies showed that honeybees exhibit a most sophisticated form of animal communication only matched by primates. The subsequent work on the elements of the dance language of the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, revealed some basic elements and started the comparative work on the sister species in Asia. Dance languages, although the basic principles are the same, differ intraspecifically and interspecifically among the different Apis species, mostly due to a genetic difference, behavioural diversity and differences in nesting sites. Of the 11 recognized species of Apis honeybees, they can be categorized into three main groups; the dwarf honeybees (two species) and giant honeybees (three species) build a single comb attached to a tree branch or under a cliff overhang and cavity-nesting species (six species) which differ fundamentally in their nesting biology. Since the initial studies, great strides have been made with respect to unique properties of dancing in Asian bees. The dwarf bees, A. florea and A. andreniformis, retain a fundamental difference to all the others because they are the only group that dances in the horizontal plane. Their open nesting makes them an ideal study model to investigate topics including the significance of the dance floor and the nature of targeting food sources or new nest sites. Geography and complexity of landscape along a changing environment will affect the shape of the dance curve as so-called ‘dance dialects’, so it is not possible to use any standardized calibration curve for the interpretation of dances, even for the same colony. Finally, we discuss in this chapter all the other kinds of information that are conveyed before, during or after dancing among worker bees, and the individual adaptive value of these communication channels.
