Scientific Translations: The Language of Bees

Scientific Translations are extremely important in when conducting scientific research. In 1923, ethologist Karl von Frisch began working to uncover the then-shrouded mystery of the language of bees and how bees communicate.  With his Nobel Prize-winning research, he was able to prove that honeybees used a complex set of cues to inform each other about food sources.  The most frequently observed of such cues was a dance-like movement performed by forager bees, a movement later coined by scientists as the “waggle dance.”

Prior to this discovery, communication this complex had only been observed in primates—humans, specifically.  So it came as a shock to the scientific community that in the short span of a dance, a simple-brained bee could not only communicate the location of a food source in relation to the sun, but also its distance from the hive and its quality.  The forager, upon arriving back at the hive, beelines towards a special dance floor where her show will take place.  During her performance, the bee’s body is positioned in relation to an imaginary vertical line pointing to the sun, at an angle relative to the source’s position from the sun.  So if, for example, the flower was in the direct path of the sun, the bee would waggle in a straight vertical direction. However, if the food source was located 30° to the right of the sun’s position, she would then angle her body upwards 30° to the right of the vertical sun-line before executing her dance.  The length of her performance indicates the distance of the source from the hive and the vigor of her waggle expresses the quality of her find.

While Frisch’s honeybee dance-language hypothesis is now accepted as an undeniable biological fact, one major question remains: can a system of communication like this really be called a language?  Some, like Eileen Crist, an Associate Professor in Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, argue that the waggle dance unarguably fulfills the criteria for characterization as a language. It is characterized by five key attributes:

1. Rule-governed
2. Complexity
3. Stability and Dynamism
4. Symbolic
5. Performative

To back up that claim, researchers have learned that the waggle dance has the means to communicate at least 40 million unique messages—10 times as many as any other known species besides the human race.  Despite the astonishing nature of these discoveries, there is still a little doubt.  Skeptics, such as Stephen Anderson, Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, argue (among many things) that because this communication style is a genetically fixed rather than a learned behavior, it cannot be compared to human language.

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it is hard not to admire the enormity of such an intricately structured and accurate communication system being practiced by an animal so seemingly limited with such a tiny brain. If these little creatures are capable of so much, then what about the rest of the animal kingdom? It may be that language is all around us—we just haven’t learned to understand it yet.

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