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BEIJING: Honeybees are able to understand the foreign languages
communicated through the dances of bees from different continents,
scientists from China, Australia and Germany have found.
Experiments showed a subspecies of Asian
honeybees could understand the dance of European honeybees and thus
locate the food sources when the bees were raised in the same hive.
Dr. Songkun Su of Zhejiang University’s
College of Animal Sciences, who headed the study, said the research
team found the Asian honeybee, Apis cerana cerana, could quickly
grasp the distinctive dance of the European Apis mellifera ligustica
subspecies, as they conveyed information on the locations of food
sources.
The research team included Shaowu Zhang of the
Australian National University, Shenglu Chen of Zhejiang University
and Juergen Tautz from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. Their
findings were published in the June issue of the Public Library of
Science journal PLoS ONE.
The honeybee waggle dance was recognized as the
only known form of symbolic communication in an invertebrate.
Research on the dance language and orientation
of bees earned Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 1973.
Previous studies showed honeybees performed
different dances to indicate distances between food sources and
their habitats.
-- Xinhua
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