Different bee populations have different 'accents' in their waggle dances. An Italian bee's dance means something different to an Austrian bee.
Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
The Language of the Hive
In Munich, the zoologist Karl von Frisch spent decades observing honeybees (Apis mellifera) inside special glass-walled hives. His work, which earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, deciphered a complex symbolic languages in the animal kingdom. When a forager bee finds a plentiful source of nectar or pollen, she returns to the darkness of the hive and performs a specific set of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb to recruit other bees.
This "waggle dance" communicates two pieces of information: direction and distance. The direction of the food source is indicated by the angle of the bee's dance relative to the vertical. This angle corresponds to the direction of the food source relative to the sun's position in the sky. The distance is communicated by the duration of the "waggle run," the straight portion of the dance where the bee vigorously shakes her abdomen. A longer waggle run signals a more distant food source. For example, a waggle run lasting one second might indicate a food source roughly one kilometer away. For very close sources, typically under 100 meters, bees perform a simpler "round dance," moving in circles to indicate that food is nearby without specifying a precise direction.
A Communication Breakdown
Von Frisch and his student Martin Lindauer discovered that this language is not universal among all honeybees. Different subspecies of Apis mellifera have their own distinct "dialects." The Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica), native to Austria and the Balkans, has a different interpretation of the waggle run's duration than the Italian honey bee (Apis mellifera ligustica).
For the same flight distance, an Italian bee will perform a longer waggle run than a Carniolan bee. This creates a "misunderstanding" if the two subspecies are in the same hive. A Carniolan bee observing an Italian bee's dance will fly farther than the intended distance, because in her dialect, that longer dance signifies a more distant source. An Italian bee will interpret a Carniolan's dance as indicating a much closer source.
The threshold for switching from a round dance to a waggle dance also varies. Italian bees (A. m. ligustica) may switch to the waggle dance for distances greater than 40 meters, while Carniolan bees (A. m. carnica) use the round dance for sources up to about 50 meters. These dialects are adaptations to the bees' typical foraging environments. Subspecies that have evolved in areas requiring longer foraging trips tend to have "slower" dialects—a shorter waggle run for a given distance—to efficiently communicate over a larger area.
💡Fun Facts
Karl von Frisch's initial theories about the bee dance, published in the 1920s, were met with widespread skepticism for decades before being definitively proven.
Bees can navigate even on overcast days by detecting patterns of polarized light in the sky, which still indicate the sun's position.
The tempo of the dance is also part of the dialect; some bees perform more figure-eight circuits in a given time than others for the same distance.
When von Frisch created mixed-species colonies, bees of one subspecies were able to understand the "foreign" dialect of another, even though their own dances retained their native dialect.
The work of Karl von Frisch is associated with the University of Munich (LMU). The nearby Munich-Nymphenburg Botanical Garden is open daily, typically from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with slight variations by season.
Admission
Admission to the Botanical Garden is around €5.50 for an adult day pass.
Accessibility
The Botanical Garden has paved and gravel paths that are largely flat and accessible.
