Ontogeny

While not much is known about the development of the waggle dance in honey bees, there have been several studies to work to understand whether different species have different dialects. The dialect or coding of the distance during the dance may be different between species depending on their foraging ranges. Smaller bodied bees with smaller foraging ranges had much more precise distance coding than the larger bodied species (R. W. K. Punchihewa and N. Koeniger and P. G. Kevan and R. M. Gadawski. (1985)).

When two species of honey bees that had different distance coding in their dances were put together in a mixed-species colony, it was seen that the two species each maintained a separate and distinctly species-specific dialect. This indicates that the dance dialect is innate to the species rather than learned. However, in the mixed species hive, the different species were able to recruit each other’s forager bees using the waggle dance and the bees were able to understand the different dialects to find the food sources. Social learning may be a factor in how the honey bees learn to interpret the dances and find the correct food source. Su S, Cai F, Si A, Zhang S, Tautz J, et al. (2008)

Figure 3. When multiple species were raised in the same colony, the species retained their different “dialects”. The Acc species had consistently longer durations for the distances in both single species and mixed species colonies, while the Aml species had consistently shorter durations of dances. It shows a statistically significant difference in the species dance dialects in both mixed and single colony conditions (Su S, Cai F, Si A, Zhang S, Tautz J, et al. (2008)).

Another study observed different dialects of the waggle dance within one species, such as the variations of the round dance and the sickle dance. This is believed to be due to the genetic inheritance of a single locus over different alleles and the different dialects can be seen in one colony through tests in cross-breeding. This gives more evidence to the theory that the dance is genetically inherited rather than learned within the species. (Johnson, Oldroyd, et. al, 2002).

Figure 4. Bees demonstrating foraging behaviors.

Selective pressures on the honey bees foraging may lead to the development of the waggle dance. The environmental pressures of spatially distance clumped food sources contributed to the need for a communication as well as a system for foraging there. In some environments like tropical habitats which have more distributed food sources, the waggle dance is more essential for the foraging success of the honey bees than other more temperate habitats that have less clustered food sources. (Dornhaus, Anna and Chittka, Lars (2004)).

There may also be a connection between undernourishment in juvenile bees and whether they will be good waggle dancers or foragers in adulthood. One study found that those that underwent pollen stress were less likely to do a waggle dance than unstressed bees. Also it was determined that the information that the stressed bees passed through the dance was less precise than the unstressed controls (Scofield, Mattila, 2015).