Abstract
Although the structure of the dance language is very similar among species of honeybees, communication of the distance component of the message varies both intraspecifically and interspecifically. However, it is not known whether different honeybee species would attend interspecific waggle dances and, if so, whether they can decipher such dances. Using mixed-species colonies of Apis cerana and Apis mellifera, we show that, despite internal differences in the structure of the waggle dances of foragers, both species attend, and act on the information encoded in each other’s waggle dances but with limited accuracy. These observations indicate that direction and distance communication pre-date speciation in honeybees.
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Acknowledgements
We thank B.P. Oldroyd and C.W.W. Pirk for comments on the manuscript. Financial support was granted to Tan Ken by the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Science and Yunnan Agricultural University of China.
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Tan, K., Yang, M.X., Radloff, S.E. et al. Dancing to different tunes: heterospecific deciphering of the honeybee waggle dance. Naturwissenschaften 95, 1165–1168 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0437-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0437-1