For any use social society to function smoothly, good communication is essential. In this lesson, we will explore how different types of communication allow European honey bees to coordinate efforts for foraging, hive management and swarming. While humans often convey information through gestures, bees have taken body language to a whole new level that allows them to communicate extremely specific information very quickly. The complex dance language of European honey bees is the most sophisticated non-chemical communication system in the insect world and is the main form of communication between individual bees within a colony. Dances are performed by worker bees on vertical surfaces of honeycombs or in the outer layers of a bee swarm. Here, we'll discuss three dances that are important to the European honey bee. The simplest type of dance is called the Round Dance, which communicates the availability of food in close proximity to the nest usually within 15 meters. Foragers exchange bits of food during this dance which tells other bees about the type and quality of the resource and provides them with a scent to follow, enabling efficient resource location. This dance does not convey precise information about the location of the food source, which may actually be beneficial since the new foragers will be unlikely to visit the exact same flower. The aptly-named waggle dance is used to communicate precise information. Specifically the direction and distance of far away food sources. The waggle dance takes on a figure eight pattern and the bees shake or waggle their abdomens during the performance. The angle from the vertical axis of the straight portion of the dance indicates the direction of the food source relative to the sun. The length of the straight portion of the dance communicates distance and the longer the straight portion, the greater the distance. As you can imagine though, bees don't report distance using the metric or even the imperial system. Instead, they convey distance in terms of the amount of effort required to get to the food source. Therefore, a trip with strong headwinds would be communicated as farther than a trip with no wind even if the physical distance is the same. If the resource is particularly rich in pollen and nectar a bee will waggle more vigorously during the dance than they would while communicating a poor food source. As in the Round Dance, pollen and nectar may be exchanged during this dance to help other bees locate the right flowers. The waggle dance is used to describe locations over a 100 meters away. For food located between 15 and 100 meters from the hive, intermediate forums of the round and waggle dances are performed. The final type of dance is a bit of a mouthful. It's called the dorsal ventral abdominal vibration dance or DVAV for short. DVAV, involves the dorsal ventral vibration of the communicating bee's abdomen and like the round and waggle dance is performed by worker bees. While the exact functions of this dance are unclear, it may be used to regulate both daily and seasonal foraging activities in response to food availability. This dance may also influence queen emergence and the initiation of swarming behavior although the exact mechanisms are not well understood. While complex information is communicated through dance, bees like most used social insects also rely heavily on pheromones for communication. European honey bees have many glands, some of which produce wax or substances that modify nectar and pollen into digestible forms. Other glands produce a variety of pheromones that serve as signaling compounds for communication with other nest mates. One gland in the abdomen called the Nasonov's gland produces footprint pheromones. These are pheromones that act as beacons to orient bees to important places such as the nest entrance, water and nectar collection sites or swarm clusters. Footprint pheromones can also be produced by glands located on the bee's tarsal. Beekeepers can use synthetic footprint pheromones to attract a hive-less swarm to a new hive. Worker bees can also produce alarm pheromones released from both mandibular and abdominal glands. Alarm pheromone signals danger and stimulate defensive behaviors in other members of the colony. The aggressive Africanised honey bees have a greater sensitivity to alarm pheromones than European honey bees and so usually deploy more defenders when the hive is attacked. Pheromone communication also helps bees with general colony management and are important cues used to recognize fellow kin, the queen and the hive of itself. Many types of pheromones are produced by queen bees for hive management and maintaining hive equilibrium. Queen mandibular pheromone for example, inhibits egg production by workers and is the signal to the colony that there is a healthy queen, the queen produces this in her mandibular glands and feeds it to her attendant worker bees. These attendance feed the pheromone to other workers and in this way, it is passed throughout the colony. The queen also produces other pheromones that can inhibit queen cell formation, function and queen recognition or influence swarming behavior. Finally, both queens and drones produce pheromones to attract each other during the mating season. When the hive has extra room for honey storage and there are many empty cells, these clusters of empty cells release chemical signals that induce nectar foraging in workers. Developing larvae in cells produce pheromones to indicate their presence and also to stimulate pollen foraging activities. Cells are also chemically labeled to indicate the type of larvae for feeding purposes especially queen cells. European honey bees are insects that live in complex use social societies and communicate through dance and pheromones. These communication methods enable colonies to organize large numbers of individuals in a coordinated manner for important activities such as foraging, brood care and defense among others. In the next lesson, we'll examine challenges associated with beekeeping and discuss a number of diseases that commonly impact European honeybee colonies.
