Honey Bee Recruitment: The Dance-Language Controversy

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Abstract
Depending on conditions, honey bee recruits use either the dance language and odor information, or odors alone. Wenner''s conclusion that bees can have only 1 strategy for recruitment which they use under all circumstances is clearly incorrect. Recruitment to odors alone might be the usual system in honey bee colonies not under stress. By their very different training techniques, von Frisch and Wenner may have been sampling 2 stages of the same process: exploitation of an abundant food source. Von Frisch''s experiments could be seen as examining the early phase, while Wenner''s would be exploring a later phase. The inherently spectacular nature of the dance language may have helped to emphasize it out of proportion to its actual place in the ecology and dynamics of foraging. Alternatively, single, abundant, extensive food sources may be more typical of current agricultural practices than of the tropical forests in which the honey bee and its language evolved. In that case, the ability to direct recruits to a distant, isolated patch of food quickly, either before it was found by another colony or another species, or before the potentially brief blooming period ended, might have been a real advantage. Only further work can establish whether the dance-language communication is common or rare under normal circumstances. Even a rare phenomenon may still be real, the dance language is a real and very significant phenomenon indeed. Some of the resistance to the idea that honey bees possess a symbolic language seems to have arisen from a conviction that lower animals, and insects in particular, are too small and phylogenetically remote to be capable of complex behavior. There is perhaps a feeling of incongruity in that the honey bee language is symbolic and abstract, and, in terms of information capacity at least, 2nd only to human language. Despite expectations, animals continue to be more complex than was thought, or than experimenters may have been prepared to discover.