Book Review - Communication between Honeybees : More than Just a Dance in the Dark - Springer Nature

      Just when you thought you knew all there was to know about bee communication, along comes a book to dispel that myth!

     Jürgen Tautz is a renowned researcher and a formidable communicator, blessed with that rare ability to write a book filled with information for the scientific reader yet equally accessible to the lay person. The central theme explored in this work, as is implied by the subtitle "more than just a dance in the dark", is that while the waggle dance is an important source of communication among bees, it does not reveal the whole story. It is overvalued insofar as it ignores communication outside the hive.

     The waggle dance was first recognized by Karl von Frisch, who, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, was awarded a Nobel Prize. It became established orthodoxy, accepted at face value by most researchers that the dance conveyed all information required to locate a source of food; to challenge a Nobel laureate requires a certain degree of bravery after all!

     Tautz does not question the central importance of the waggle dance, nor von Frisch's contribution to the science of bees, but he argues that it is useful only in conjunction with communication received outside the hive - "Previous research on the dance language of bees concentrated mostly on what happens in hives and at food sites and ignored events in the field" (p. 111).  Bees following a scent trail, for example, are using external stimuli to locate a foraging area, supplementing the primary information communicated by the waggle dance.

Communication in the open (Ingo Arndt)

     The following infographic succinctly illustrates the relationship between communication in the hive via the waggle dance and its fine tuning outside the hive.

     This should be displayed prominently as a poster wherever entomology is taught - on any level!     

     As the reader goes through this book, Tautz takes us on a tour of the research throughout the ages that leads us to where we are today, from Aristotle to Spengel, to Maeterlinck, to Gould - and many others.

     The waggle dance serves also to enable bee swarms to locate and occupy new homes, but this would be impossible without communication in the field. From the book beginning on page 122 -

"Everything that research has presented so far to confirm the classical thesis that despite inaccuracies the bee dance leads the bees directly to the food source falls away in the recruitment of small cohorts to a newly discovered nest site:

1. In this most critical phase, bees cannot derive an averaged correct instruction from many (half-true) dance rounds because at first only a single bee dances for the goal.

2. To spread out over an area, advantageous for a broad field of flowers, would be fatal. A single advertised hollow must be visited, virtually a single point in the landscape.

3. No goal-orienting signals emanate from the hollow.

4. Without a continuation of communication in the field, each scout bee would remain alone with her discovery and no recruit would arrive at the site." (Emphasis mine).

     Time and again, Tautz illustrates that the bee dance is the initial component of communication - but not the whole story, and acted on alone would result in failure.

     The book concludes with an excellent glossary and a magnificently comprehensive list of further references. 

     It has been a unique privilege for me to review this book, and I would find it impossible to adequately summarize what I have learned from it. Every so often, a text comes along that stands out from all others, written by a dedicated researcher possessed of the talent required to convey complex science to a wide audience. I take my hat off to Jürgen Tautz who has accomplished just that, and the world of bee research is all the better for it.

Communication between Honeybees: More than Just a Dance in the Dark - Springer Nature

Author: Jürgen Tautz

165 pages - 59 colour illustrations - 8 b/w illustrations

ISBN 978-3-030-99483-9

Publishing September 2022