Scientists decipher and codify the universal language of bees

The two assistant professors and their teams have decoded the honey bee language to allow other scientists from around the world to interpret the extremely sophisticated and complex communications of these insects.

In an article published in the April issue of Animal behaviorresearchers are presenting an extraordinary breakthrough: a universal calibration or, for science-fiction enthusiasts, a "babel fish" translating bee communications across subspecies and landscapes. By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in insect movements, called swinging dances, the teams hope to better understand the preferred forages of insects and the location of these food sources.

"Before feeding the pollinators, we need to know when and where they need food, we need to decode waggle dances," said Schürch, the newspaper's main author. "So, it's a fundamental first step."

The researchers analyzed the dances of 85 marked bees from three hives.

It turns out that bee transmissions have repercussions on agriculture, the environment and the economy. The USDA estimates that in the United States, one out of every three food morsels depends on honey bees and other pollinators. In monetary terms, pollinating insects contribute to crop yields and agricultural ecosystems and contribute about $ 24 billion to the US economy each year.

The work of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences team is part of a larger grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a non-profit organization created through in support of the bipartite congress in the 2014 Farm Bill. Couvillon and Schürch, as well as Sally Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology, and Megan O. Rourke, Assistant Professor at the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, study the behavior of pollinators in different landscapes to determine where and when to plant additional forage the most positive impact on pollinator nutrition and health.

Nearly six decades ago, Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Karl von Frisch discovered that the dancer's body angle to the vertical coded the direction of the fodder and that the distance to the food source was indicated by the duration of the bee. Dance.

During the wagon dance, a successful browser returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction between the hive and the food source by performing multiple repeating eight-shaped movements, called carriage races.

Because of the challenge and the cost of creating an original calibration of duration versus distance, von Frisch 's calibration model, based on averages rather than data from other sources. bees, was used as a reference for the bee research community.

However, according to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees carrying the same place can vary their strokes in stride, and even bees repeating a race can change their dance. In addition, bees are only inspired to dance when they have found food resources that are particularly enticing. Anomalies such as these, coupled with a better understanding of bee's highly developed cognition, prompted both spouses to develop their own distance-time calibration system six years ago with bee-dominant bees. mellifera mellifera in Sussex Kingdom.

"We collected this information from many bees in two different landscapes separated by an ocean and several years," said Couvillon. "However, there are still many things that we do not know what bees are feeding on, so imagine you're decoding a lot of dances and putting them on a map to see where they're going." We wanted to do it seasonally to provide a complete overview of what they are looking for and where they are, so we can also see if it is harder for them to find forage and more easily. "

Team members spend months analyzing the movements of each dancer to determine a distance-time calibration.

After arriving at Virginia Tech in 2016, the pair sought to determine whether or not their system could be applied to A. mellifera ligustica, a different genetic subspecies in the United States and in a very different landscape. Guided by empirical knowledge and a new hypothesis, they also took noise into account, that is to say a variation of the dance in the bees that visit the same place, but communicate this information a little differently, to improve the model predictions.

"It takes a lot of time, effort and expense to conduct this type of study," said Couvillon. "We decode the dances by hand."

Their careful calibration process requires that each bee be numbered and videotaped. The team members then spend months in front of computers analyzing the movements of each dancer to determine a calibration of duration versus duration.

"What also differentiates our research is that we have trained a large number of bees and have followed them for long distances," Schürch said. "You can train bees to go to a feeder and move it further and further away."

For the Virginia study, the researchers analyzed the dances of 85 marked bees from three hives. They then compared their system to a previously published calibration.

The next step was to compare and then collect their data with all published calibration studies. In doing so, the team discovered that the individual noise, or variation between the bees, was so high that the difference between the location and the subspecies was rendered biologically irrelevant.

"Although there are differences between populations in the way they communicate, it does not matter to bees," Schürch said. "We can not differentiate them as to how they translate this information, there is a huge overlap, in fact, a bee from England would include a Virginia bee and find a food source in the same way with a similar success rate. "

By combining all of their calibration data, Couvillon and Schürch have made their work universal for other researchers, providing scientists around the world with a codex to decipher where bees collect food. . This knowledge will not only document the best practices for bee-friendly planting, but will also be critical to maintaining their populations.

"We think this research may allow bees to be used as bioindicators," Couvillon said. "Bees can tell us in high spatial and temporal resolution where forage is available and at what time of the year, so if you want to build a mall, for example, we would know if the main habitat pollinators would be destroyed, and where bees are foraging, other species too, conservation efforts may follow. "

The researchers hope to be able to further dismantle the Tower of Babel over the next few years by automating the decoding process to enable a more accurate and faster assessment of the position of bees in real time.

"We are a year and a half removed from the analysis of bees – imagine if you had it instantly," Couvillon said.

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More information:
Roger Schürch et al. Dismantling of Babel: creation of a universal calibration for the decoding of the honey bee dance, Animal behavior (2019). DOI: 10.1016 / j.anbehav.2019.01.016