“Communication Between Honeybees”: Reviewed By Dr Tom Seeley.

Another new book on honey bee communication launches this month and is available from Northern Bee Books at £22.99. Non-scientist beekeepers might find this is a difficult book to review given the complexities of the new suggestions that conflict with what we have already learned from science. Unless one is fully cognizent of previous work, research methods and data analysis, a highly respected scientist seems like the ideal person to give a fully informed and balanced review of this book, and I’m grateful to Professor Tom Seeley for sharing this with us. Thank you, Tom. This review was also written for publication in The American Bee Journal.

Review.

Communication Between Honeybees:  More Than Just a Dance in the Dark. 

By Jürgen Tautz.  Springer Nature Switzerland AG.  $26.39.  xi + 165 p.; ill.; no index.  ISBN: 978-3-030-99483-9 (hc); 978-3-030-99484-6 (eb). 2022.

Only human beings and honey bees are able to guide groupmates to food bonanzas by providing abstract information about their locations.  In every other species of group-living animal, individuals guide others to a rich food source either by leading them to it or by marking the way to it, e.g. laying a chemical trail.  So, it is not surprising that the waggle dance of honey bees has attracted close study ever since it was deciphered in the mid 1940s by an Austrian zoologist, Karl von Frisch.  In the mid 1960s, he reviewed his investigations in a 566-page book, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees.  Now, some sixty years later, a German neuroethologist, Jürgen Tautz, has written a much slimmer, 165-page book that aims to synthesize what von Frisch and subsequent investigators have learned about how honey bees recruit hive mates to profitable food sources by means of the waggle dance. 

This new book by Tautz appears to have been written for biologists, not beekeepers.  I say this because even though Tautz presents simplified descriptions of the findings of key studies, I encountered many places where I had difficulty understanding what he has written.  Some of these difficulties reflect glitches in the book’s translation from German to English.  For example, he uses throughout the book the word “half-truth,” to describe what Karl von Frisch reported about the sensory and communication abilities of worker bees.  I wonder if Tautz realizes that a half-truth is a statement that is only partly true and is intended to deceive.  (I am certain that Karl von Frisch never intended to deceive his readers.)  Another source of difficulty that I encountered in reading Tautz’s book is that its brevity often makes it hard to follow the explanations of the complex biological ideas it addresses.  For example, I had to turn to other books to review what is known about the visual abilities and the vibration sensitivities of worker honey bees, to understand what is presented in this book on these topics.   

Tautz begins his book by giving the reader a useful, three-part framework for thinking about how a recruited bee locates a rich flower patch:  1) by being directed to its general location (i.e., by following a waggle dance to learn its direction, distance, and floral scent; (2) by searching in  the indicated area for attractive stimuli (e.g., by seeking brightly colored flowers emitting the learned floral scent, and perhaps also nestmates releasing assembly pheromone from their scent glands); and 3) by being attracted to the bright colors and alluring scents of the flowers that have been found in the search area.  So far, so good. 

Then, however, Tautz’s text becomes sprinkled with strange items.  For example, Tautz cites at length the error-laden writings of Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian playwright and poet.  Another odd item is how Tautz takes the observation that worker honey bees sometimes expose their (Nasonov) scent glands while standing at a sugar-water feeder as evidence that these bees do this while they are flying to a rich food source. Nobody knows if worker bees do this, for it is impossible to closely observe the bodies of bees when they are flying over the countryside. Regrettably, this book is not a totally trustworthy source of information.    

Tautz does, however, do a pretty good job of describing the elegant “mis-direction” experiments performed by James L. Gould in the 1970s.  These experiments showed that worker bees can be recruited to the location of a rich food source by getting distance and direction information from a dancing bee.  It is disappointing, though, that Tautz fails to mention another key thing that was revealed by Gould’s work:  a worker honey bee needs neither a visual cue (i.e., a stream of fast-flying bees) nor a chemical signal (i.e., an aerial trail of the Nasonov gland scent) to be recruited to a food source.  Gould’s mis-direction experiments show this because the bees that performed waggle dances in his experiments were not advertising the site that they were visiting.  Gould had cleverly tricked the bees visiting his sugar-water feeder to “lie” about the direction to this feeder when they performed their waggle dances.  The fact that the recruits showed up at the site being advertised by the dancing bees, but not at the site being visited by the dancing bees, tells us that the dance information, by itself, is sufficient for bees to find the location that a dancing bee is reporting.  These results show, too, that the dance information can be much more important than any visual cues or scent trails that successful foragers might provide to steer hive mates to a rich food source.

Although Communication Between Honeybees is not a model of clear and precise writing, the author is to be applauded for trying to write a synthesis of what has been learned over the past 100 years about how honey bees, like human beings, are able to direct their group mates to important places in the environment.  The current evidence does not convincingly show that worker honey bees lead others, or make scent trails, to guide their nestmates to these places.  But we do know for sure that worker honey bees, by performing waggle dances, inform their nestmates about the directions and distances to good sources of food, snug homesites, handy water sources, and other important places.

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Thank you, Ann 🐝