- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You're dancing in the dark, on a small, crowded dance floor with lots of obstacles, and you're trying to communicate to other foragers where that great resource is. You're relating the direction, distance, and quality of the resource (pollen, nectar, propolis, or water) so that they too, can find it, collect it and return it to the hive.
Can you do that? And also perform other communications, like letting the colony know where a good nesting site is?
No?
Want to learn more about honey bee communication?
Enter bee biologist James Nieh, a professor and an associate dean at UC San Diego. He'll present a seminar, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. His seminar, "Danger, Dopamine, and Dance: New Insights from the Magic Well of Honey Bee Communication," also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
Nieh, who is a faculty member of the Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, and associate dean of Biological Sciences, has studied honey bee communication for decades.
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," he writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article, "Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees," published in Science in March, 2023, Nieh and his research team showed that "correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species. that correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000.
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
So there she is, a gnarly-looking praying mantis, the last of the season, and on her last legs. Last spiked forelegs?
From her perch on a cactus in a Vacaville garden, this Stagmomantis limbata is neither praying nor preying. She is staring. She almost resembles a cartoon character with her wide-spaced bulging eyes atop a triangular head and a pencil-thin neck. One antenna up, one trying to stay down.
Ms. Gnarly Mantis doesn't look at all like a skilled ambush predator.
"Hey, there!" I say.
"Hey, there, yourself! Whatcha looking at?"
"You!"
"Whatcha doing?"
"Taking a photo of you!"
This species, native to North America, is also known as a bordered mantis, an Arizona mantis or a New Mexico praying mantis.
I know S. limbata as a garden treasure.
"Females are most often fairly plain green (often with a yellowish abdomen), but sometimes gray, or light brown, with dark spot in middle of the tegmina, which do not completely cover the wide abdomen. Hind wings may be checkered or striped yellow," according to Wikipedia. "Males are slender, long-winged, and variable in color, but most often green and brown with the sides of the folded tegmina green and top brownish (may be solid gray, brown, green, or any combination of these). Abdomen without prominent dark spots on top. The wings are transparent, usually with cloudy brownish spots on outer half."
Ms. Gnarly Mantis hung around for three days and then she vanished. A hungry California scrub jay may have nailed her.
Or maybe not...
But she bequeathed us her ootheca before her last goodbye.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
In his essay, The Decay of Lying (1889), Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote: “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” adding “the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may release that energy.”
Take the case of a mural on Main Street, Vacaville, the work of Cheyenne Renee Marcus. The artist, based in Covington, Va., painted the mural in 2022 with plans to paint 50 murals in 50 states. All in small towns. (See the Vacaville project on YouTube)
Her mural shows a young girl in a billowing blue dress blowing the seeds off a dandelion--perhaps she's making a wish?--while a flameskimmer dragonfly zigzags away.
The dragonfly is firecracker red, in sharp contrast to the light blue dress.
The mural is located at 444 Main St.-- actually in the alley--on the wall of a building now occupied by a wine bar, Main Grape.
One thing's for sure, that flameskimmer is a main attraction. On a cold, wintry day, it's a burst of joy and spirit, much like the little girl blowing the seeds off a dandelion, destination unchartered, but the making of a promise.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Page, a UC Davis doctoral alumnus, a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, wrote an article The Art of the Bee for the journal, and editor Robert Brodschneider interviewed him in a piece titled Robert E. Page Jr--Mapper of the Genetic Architecture of the Honey Bee.
Rob lives and breathes bees, UC Davis, and Arizona State University (ASU). He obtained his doctorate in entomology in 1980 from UC Davis; joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989; and chaired the Department of Entomology from 1999 to 2004. After retiring from UC Davis in 2004, he accepted an appointment at ASU as founding director of the School of Life Sciences. He served as provost of ASU from 2013- 2015, and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2011-2013.
His research on honey bee behavior and genetics appears in his publications: Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding (1997, with Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., his major professor at UC Davis and "the father of honey bee genetics"); The Spirit of the Hive, Harvard University Press (2013); and The Art of the Bee, Oxford University Press (2020). His 230-plus research papers have been cited more than 20,000 times.
Much of Rob Page's research occurred at UC Davis. For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, he maintained a honey bee-breeding program, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk, at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, west of the central campus. Their contributions include discovering a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees. Their work was featured in a cover story in the journal Nature. In all, Nature featured his work on four covers from work mostly done at UC Davis.
Looking to learn more about bees? You'll want to pick up a copy of his book, ;The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, 2020, Oxford University Press), and/or access his newly created free YouTube channel, The Art of the Bee," at https://www.youtube.com/@artofthebee.
Why did Page create the free and accessible-to-all YouTube Channel? Because that's what Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), known as a German geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science, would have done.
It's about making science understandable.
"Von Humboldt appealed to artists to learn about nature, and ecology, and paint it," Page wrote in the Bee World article. "He believed that artists and writers could do more to advance an understanding of science and nature than the scientific specialist. His plea was for making science understandable to the public, a plea for popular science."
Page's YouTube channel guides the viewer through "the fascinating biology and behavior of the bee," presented in 38 videos ranging from 4 to 27 minutes in length. He organized the videos into six segments that roughly correspond to the nine chapters of the book:
- Landscape Artists
- Environmental Engineers
- The Social Contract
- Superorganisms
- How to Make a Superorganism
- Song of the Queen.
We love this passage from his book:
"The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly-colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment."
We can learn so much from the bees...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The next UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar will feature professor James Nieh, a bee biologist in the Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, UC San Diego and associate dean in the Division of Biological Sciences.
He'll speak on "Danger, Dopamine, and Dance: New Insights from the Magic Well of Honey Bee Communication" at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. The seminar also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," Nieh writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article titled "Unlocking Secrets of the Honeybee Dance Language--Bees Learn and Culturally Transmit Their Communication Skills," and published March 9, 2023 in The Conversation, Nieh described the waggle dance as "one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other were to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical 'waggle dance.' this dance conveys the This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee's nestmates."
Nieh related exactly how the bees perform the waggle dance. "Essentially, the dancer points recruits in the correct direction and tells them how far to go by repeatedly circling around in a figure eight pattern centered around a waggle run, in which the bee waggles its abdomen as it moves forward. Dancers are pursued by potential recruits, bees that closely follow the dancer, to learn where to go to find the communicated resource."
"Longer waggle runs communicate greater distances," Nieh wrote, "and the waggle angle communicates direction. For higher-quality resources such as sweeter nectar, dancers repeat the waggle run more times and race back faster after each waggle run."
Nieh noted that "The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings.
"Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with multiple animal languages. But why should humans and other animals need to learn a language instead of being born with this knowledge, like many other animal species?"
Nieh went on to point out that "This question fascinates me and my colleagues and is the basis for our recent paper published in the journal Science. As a biologist, I have spent decades studying honeybee communication and how it may have evolved."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
Resources:
- Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees, March 9, 2023, Science
- Bees Can Teach Their Young to Dance, March 9, 2023, Washington Post
- The Waggle Dance, PBS documentary on YouTube
