Training bees to talk

 Well, sort-of. Not really. But that's how I'm going to spin it.

By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in the insects' movements, called waggle dances, the teams hope to better understand the insects' preferred forages and the location of these food sources. Nearly six decades ago, Karl von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning ethologist, discovered that the angle of the dancer's body relative to the vertical encodes the direction of the forage, and the distance to the food source is communicated by the duration of the bee's dance. 

During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs. According to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees conveying the same location can vary their waggle runs, and even individual bees repeating a run may alter their dance. Moreover, bees are inspired to dance only when they have located particularly tantalizing food resources. Anomalies such as these, coupled with a greater understanding of bees' highly developed cognition, inspired the husband-and-wife duo to develop their own distance-duration calibration system six years ago.

Their meticulous calibration process requires that each bee is numbered and videotaped. Team members then spend months in front of computers analysing each dancer's movements to determine a distance-to-duration calibration. "What also makes our research different is that we trained many numbers of bees and followed them great distances," said Schürch. "You can train bees to go to a feeder and move it farther and farther away."

Being able to translate bee communications no doubt has a bazillion fantastic spin-offs, but what I'm really interested in is animal cognition. There was a recent article on how bees can count up to four and even understand zero at some level, which is remarkable. But are they thinking or just responding mechanically to external stimuli ? Do they actually understand (whatever that means) what they're doing or are they just acting on pure instinct ? Does a bee have the same kind of internal experiences as a human or is it no more than a flying furry abacus ? We can never know for sure, but this gives some interesting clues :

The team discovered that the individual noise, or variation between bees, was so high that the difference between location and sub-species was rendered biologically irrelevant. "While there were differences among populations in how they communicate, it doesn't matter from the bees' perspective," said Schürch. "We cannot tell them apart in terms of how they translate this information. There is huge overlap. In effect, a bee from England would understand a bee from Virginia and would find a food source in the same way with a similar success rate."

Which strongly suggests to me that bee communication is purely genetic and instinctive. If they were actually thinking about what they were doing and understanding it, there ought to be language drift between populations. The article doesn't say how much they investigated different species though.

Researchers decipher and codify the universal language of honey bees

March 27, 2019 , Virginia Tech For Virginia Tech researchers Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, the Tower of Babel origin myth-intended to explain the genesis of the world's many languages-holds great meaning. The two assistant professors and their teams have decoded the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects' highly sophisticated and complex communications.