In the human species, an important part of the knowledge and skills are transmitted between individuals, and from one generation to another, by observation and imitation of behaviors. To refer to this cultural ability, experts use the name “social learning”, based on a theory that has the psychologist Albert Bandura as its most prominent exponent.
For decades, many thinkers and philosophers considered that humans are the only living beings with culture and social learning. Scientific evidence has shown that this anthropocentric vision does not correspond to reality. There are many other animal species that practice social learning. We are not only talking about mammals of recognized intelligence such as chimpanzees or dolphins, but even some insects present social learning.
A team of researchers from the United States and China present in the journal Science (ed. March 10, 2023) the results of a study that shows the ability of bees to learn how to perform the so-called dance or waggle of wings to communicate with each other more efficiently.
After recalling that the dance or waggle of the wings of bees (from English honeybee waggle dance) is the system used by these pollinating insects to indicate the route and location of the feeding areas, the authors of the new study present evidence that this The ability “improves with learning and can be transmitted culturally,” according to the journal Science in an informative summary of the study.
“The study demonstrates the importance of early learning of social cues in one of the most complex known examples of non-human spatial referential communication,” indicates this publication from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“We are beginning to understand that, like us, many other animals can pass on information important to their survival through communities and families. Our new research shows that we can now extend that social learning to include insects,” said study co-author James Nieh. and professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at the University of California at San Diego (California, United States).
Honey bees (Apis mellifera), like humans, many songbirds, and naked mole-rats, appear to have a critical period for language acquisition. In the case of bees, the ability to communicate by flapping their wings is already present in young individuals but it does not improve and become really efficient until these youngsters observe adult bees and imitate their movements.
James Nieh, Shihao Dong, Tao Lin and Ken Tan, these last three members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted experiments to test the details involved in wing dance communication, creating and observing colonies to study the process. transmission of information between adult and young bees.
In one of the trials, only young bees were included, so there were no adult bees that could help improve the communication skills of the dance.
The experimenters came to the conclusion that bees start dancing when they reach the right age and always follow experienced dancers before they try to dance for the first time.
“Young bees without the opportunity to follow any experienced dancers produced significantly more disordered dances, with larger oscillation angle divergence errors and incorrectly coded distance,” the researchers noted in the paper.
The bees that were able to observe and learn from experienced individuals, on the other hand, did not have this type of communication problem.
Like humans, for whom early exposure to language development is essential, bees acquired social cues that were encoded and stayed with them for life, the authors of the new study say.
Bees that did not learn the correct dance early on (as young) were able to improve their performance by subsequently observing other dancers and practicing, but were never able to correctly encode the distance. “In other words, bees that were never able to observe other dancers during their critical early stage of learning developed a new dialect that they maintained for the rest of their lives,” the experts now conclude.
The results provided evidence that social learning shapes honey bee signaling as it does early communication in many vertebrate species that also benefit from social learning.
