Natures wonders: honeybee communication (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 10, 2021, 15:37 (1321 days ago) @ David Turell

Not just the waggle dance, but answering where is the queen:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/04/honey-bees-rally-their-queen-game-telephone?utm...

"Honeybees can’t speak, of course, but scientists have found that the insects combine teamwork and odor chemicals to relay the queen’s location to the rest of the colony, revealing an extraordinary means of long distance, mass communication.

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"Honeybees communicate with chemicals called pheromones, which they sense through their antennae. Like a monarch pressing a button, the queen emits pheromones to summon worker bees to fulfill her needs. But her pheromones only travel so far. Busy worker bees, however, roam around, and they, too, can call to each other by releasing a pheromone called Nasanov, through a gesticulation known as “scenting; they raise their abdomens to expose their pheromone glands and fan their wings to direct the smelly chemicals backward.

"Scientists have long known individual bees scented, but just how these individual signals work together to gather tens of thousands of bees around a queen, such as when the colony leaves the hive to swarm, has remained a mystery.

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"Once the first worker honeybees located the queen, they began to assemble chains of evenly spaced bees that extended outward from the queen, with each bee wafting Nasanov to its neighbor down the line. The findings, reported this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first direct observations of this collective communication in honey bees. Like smelly bread crumbs, the branching communication lines guided far-off honey bees back to the queen’s location—a feat no single bee could achieve alone."

Comment: this seems like a learned behaviour considering all the special attributes honeybees have.