A newly published study by Dr. James Nieh, a member of the PSC Scientific Advisory Panel, examines the role of social learning. "Their 'waggle dance' communicates the direction, distance, and quality of a resource to nestmates by encoding celestial cues, retinal optic flow, and relative food value into motion and sound within the nest. We show that correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species."
The ability to communicate this information is foundational to the success of the colony and this study provides further understanding of the development and importance of social learning. “We know that bees are quite intelligent and have the capacity to do remarkable things,” said Nieh. “Multiple papers and studies have shown that pesticides can harm honey bee cognition and learning, and therefore pesticides might harm their ability to learn how to communicate and potentially even reshape how this communication is transmitted to the next generation of bees in a colony.” Read the UCSD full press release here and the study here.
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