Honey bees from different continents can communicate by learning to translate the language encoded in one another's dance moves, according to new research.
It's the first time communication between honey-bee species has been established and shows that bees have various cognitive skills and the ability to learn from one another.
An international science team, including Australian National University researchers, discovered that a mixed hive of Asian (Apis cerana) and European (Apis mellifera) honey bees quickly overcame language differences.
The bees learnt to decipher one another's dance dialects, sharing information about where to find food.
''The dance language of honey bees is among the best studied communication systems in the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, surprises are still possible, as we have shown,'' ANU biologist Dr Shaowu Zhang said.
The world's nine honey-bee species have developed distinctive ''dance dialects'' since they evolved separately, some 30 million to 50 million years ago.
Foraging scout bees perform various dances when they return to a hive, releasing chemicals that are thought to attract worker bees to watch and follow the directions encoded in the scouts' dance routine.
''Members of a honey-bee colony routinely exchange information via dance about the location of newly discovered feeding places, water or new nesting sites,'' Dr Zhang said.
A simple round dance with a forager bee running in circles indicates a food source close to the hive, and a crescent-shaped ''sickle dance'' indicates longer distances, from 50m to 150m.
The most important and sophisticated is the waggle dance, with the forager performing a figure-of-eight circuit while wagging its abdomen and beating its wings.
The complex dance routine encodes the distance and direction of food in relation to the angle of the sun, as indicated by the waggle duration and the dance angle. ''This duration differs across honey-bee species, even if they fly the same distance in the same environment. It's these differences which we can think of as distinct languages,'' Dr Zhang said.
The researchers used high-speed video footage to analyse minute differences in the waggle dances.
Both Asian and European honey bees used similar dance moves to indicate direction. Dancing with the head pointing upwards meant flying towards the sun, while pointing down meant flying away from the sun.
But the two species had a different dance language to indicate distance. Asian honey bees danced much longer than European bees to indicate the same distance. For European honey bees, a 1.5sec dance meant food was 600m away, while the Asian bees understood this timing to mean 400m.
In an experiment set up along the banks of the Da-Mei canal in China's Fujian province, scientists trained honey bees to visit one of six feeding stations with dishes containing a sugary liquid.
The stations were set 400m, 500m and 600m in front of and behind the hive.
The bees then returned to the hive and danced out directions so worker bees could find where to feed.
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