Dancing With Bees

by Bruce Schimmel

I used to believe that humans use language primarily to communicate. After all, the point of speaking is to be understood, right? That is, I suppose, unless you’re peddling a bad war or hawking knives on late-night TV.

Well, it might turn out that the hacks and hucksters may have been partly right all along. Language in humans may have evolved in part not to communicate ideas but to hide them.

That may be the lesson of new research on Brazilian bees, which turns the classic study of dancing bees on its stinger.

You may have read about a monumental study from the '60s about how honeybees waggle and gyrate in their hives to tell fellow workers how to fly to flowers that are dripping with nectar.

Since bees and humans are among a small number of species that use abstract representation for communication, the reason bees dance might also suggest why people talk. It suggests that bees and people both created, and use, language primarily to share ideas.

But a recent study of their communication gives the bees' ancient dance a new twist.

The bees studied by these researchers pointed fellow fliers toward sources of food not by dancing, but by other means. Unlike honeybees, many other foraging bees leave paths of hormones -- much like hikers blaze trails by painting trees.

Researchers studied a stingless Brazilian bee that used these scent trails, and found that when insect competition increased, and the fight for food got tougher, these bees' scent trails got shorter.

What this means, according to James Nieh from the University of California-San Diego, is that dancing in the hive may have evolved as strategy to avoid broadcasting important information to competitors.

In other words, bees may have created the language of dance to limit communication, to exclude outsiders who don't know the code.

That language in humans may have evolved in part to hide ideas and to create a subculture is exciting. It begins to explain all kinds of mysterious things -- and not only why some people habitually lie.

That language is a cover under which to hide may help explain the continual evolution of certain intentionally obscure dialects, including those of teenagers and other members of underclasses.

Who knew that the AOL-speak of 12-year-olds could find its evolutionary origins in the furtive dancing of bees?

The study will appear in the Oct. 22 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/proc_bio/proc_bio.html.