Bees learn waggle dance moves with a little help from their coworkers

Scientists have discovered that bees learn how to communicate via waggle dance when they're young by touching their antennae to the bodies of dancing elder bees; if they miss that chance, their dances have more mistakes, and their maps are less accurate.

Booty-shaking worker bees guide their fellow workers to pollen by a form of communication known as "waggle dancing" — performing steps that map out where food is located and how far it is from the hive.

And now scientists have discovered that bees hone these moves when they're young, by touching their antennae to the bodies of dancing elder bees; if they miss that chance, their dances have more mistakes, and their maps are less accurate.

Waggle dances are tricky to execute, and missteps can send foraging bees flying off in the wrong direction. But there's a critical learning phase in a young worker bee's life when she's about eight days old — right before she becomes a full-fledged forager — which helps her to perfect her dance.

When older workers return to the hive and waggle dance, novice workers observe them closely. By doing so, less-experienced bees learn to perform dances that generate more accurate maps to the next meal. Worker bees are all female.

Genetics play a part in bees' dances, and earlier studies have shown that some dance details relaying distance are species-specific.

However, the new findings demonstrate that the language of bees' dances is not entirely innate but is partly shaped by social learning, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.

They also found that if newbie workers were deprived of the chance to learn from more experienced bees, they produced dances that were sloppier, with more errors. Some aspects of their map-dancing improved with time, but other nuances were lost for good.