The Language of Bees is about how bees communicate, but it is also about a larger question that has followed me for most of my scientific life: why does communication take the forms that it does? Bees give us an unusually clear way to ask that question because they live in societies, forage in complex landscapes, and constantly balance cooperation with risk.
The best-known example is the honey bee waggle dance, and it deserves its fame. A forager can return to the dark nest and tell her nestmates the direction and distance of food by moving her body. That is astonishing. But one argument of my book is that the waggle dance is not the whole story. It is one gateway to a broader world.
Bees also communicate with odors, vibrations, heat, electric fields, food exchange, visual displays, and contact. Some stingless bees lay odor trails. Some mark flowers with scent beacons. Some recruit nestmates through excited jostling and sound. Honey bees can also use an inhibitory signal, the stop signal, to tell others not to keep advertising a place that has become dangerous or unprofitable. Communication is therefore not only a matter of saying “go there.” Sometimes it means “do not go there.” Sometimes it means “I see you.” Sometimes it means “this is dangerous.” Sometimes it is even intercepted by spies.
That leads to a second argument. Bee communication evolved in an ecological world full of listeners that includes nestmates, competitors, and spies. A signal that is useful to one receiver may betray information to another. This is why I spend so much time with predation, eavesdropping, competition, and even bee warfare. Communication is not just a message to friends and family. It is a message in a world where others may use that information for their own ends.
A common misunderstanding is that bees are small machines carrying out a fixed program, but they are surprisingly sophisticated. They weigh food quality, danger, colony need, distance, and what they already know. A second misunderstanding is that there is only one kind of bee (the honey bee), that all bees are social, or that “bee language” means honey bee language. In fact, there are over 20,000 bee species, and most are solitary. The book focuses on social bees because social life creates unusual pressures for communication, but it also shows how diverse bees are.
I also try to be careful about the word “language.” I do not argue that bee communication is human language. Human language is vastly more flexible and open-ended. But I think bees force us to ask better questions about animal communication. For me, the more interesting question is how evolution builds systems that allow animals to share information, influence one another, and coordinate collective life.
So, in a nutshell, this book is about the beauty, utility, and danger of communication. It is about waggle dances, stop signals, scent trails, shimmering colonies, and stingless bees in tropical forests. But beneath all of these stories lies a simple invitation: to follow the bees closely enough that their strange and wonderful world begins to make sense.
Ongoing thread. More from James C. Nieh to follow.
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