You Can Dance if You Want to, You Can Learn from Different Bees

For more than 40 years, scientists have known that honeybees communicate with one another through the language of dance. One bee flies around in loops and wags its rear end in patterns that can tell other members of the hive where to find food. Honeybees in different parts of the world perform the dance a little differently, according to a team of Australian, German, and Chinese researchers. And now the scientists say they've discovered that bees can even learn the dance language of their cousins from another continent. The researchers carefully examined an Asian species and a European species of honeybee separately to determine that they used different "dialects" of the dance—in other words, they sent the same messages with slightly different dance moves. Then the scientists placed the two groups together for as long as 50 days, and after only a few tries, the European and Asian bees learned ...