Why, when and where did honey bee dance communication evolve?

Abstract

Honey bees (Apis sp.) are the only known bee genus that uses nest-based communication to provide nest-mates with information about the location of resources, the so-called "dance language." Successful foragers perform waggle dances for high quality food sources and, when swarming, suitable nest-sites. However, since many species of social insects do not communicate the location of resources to their nest-mates, the question of why the "dance language" evolved in honey bees is of ongoing interest. We review recent theoretical and empirical research into the ecological circumstances that make dance communication beneficial in present day environments. This research suggests that the "dance language" is most beneficial when food sources differ greatly in quality and are hard to find. The dances of extant honey bee species differ in important ways, and phylogenetic studies suggest an increase in dance complexity over time: species with the least complex dance were the first to appear and species with the most complex dance are the most derived. We review the fossil record of honey bees and speculate about the time and context (foraging vs. swarming) in which spatially referential dance communication might have evolved. We conclude that there are few certainties about when the "dance language" first appeared; dance communication could be older than 40 million years and, thus, predate the genus Apis, or it could be as recent as 20 million years when extant honey bee species diverged during the early Miocene. The most parsimonious scenario assumes it evolved in a sub-tropical to temperate climate with patchy vegetation, somewhere in Eurasia.

Honeybees forage more successfully without the “dance language” in challenging environments

“…Honeybees ( Apis spp.) use a unique behavior that may have evolved more than 20 million years ago ( 18 ): The waggle dance communicates the location, odor, and presence of high-quality food (or nest) sites to nestmates ( 19 ). Finding a specific food site using this socially acquired information, as opposed to finding any food site, may increase the amount of time an individual worker spends searching for food, but it leads to the discovery of better food sources compared to bees that search for food sources by individual exploration (also called scouts) ( 20 , 21 ).…”

FoxP in bees: A comparative study on the developmental and adult expression pattern in three bee species considering isoforms and circuitry

“…To examine whether the isoform‐specific expression differences, reported for mammals (Gabut et al, ), also occur in insects, we mapped isoform‐specific AmFoxP protein expression in developing and adult honeybee brains. We also mapped FoxP expression in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris , another eusocial hymenopteran species, recently recognized for sophisticated cognitive behaviors (Mirwan, Mason, & Kevan, ; Alem et al, ; Loukola, Perry, Coscos, & Chittka, ) and in the dwarf bee ( Apis florea ) which constitutes the most basal extant species in the Apis genus and shows important behavioral differences to Apis mellifera (I'Anson Price & Grüter, ). We quantified the neuron number and volume of the largest neuron cluster (Kiya et al, ) in all three species.…”

Insights into human evolution from 60 years of research on chimpanzees at Gombe

“…Nonetheless, considering the capacity to accurately inform others about remote objects, the closest parallel to human language comes not from chimpanzees or bonobos or any other primate, but instead from social insects: the dance communication of honeybees (Apis spp.). Worker bees 'waggle dance' to indicate the distance and direction to key resources such as food, water and potential nest sites (von Frisch, 1967;l'Anson Price & Grüter, 2015). That bees have evolved this capacity suggests that a key constraint on the evolution of such informative signalling is not cognitive capacity, but social structures, such as collective foraging.…”