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In the introduction to his new book, Professor Tautz tells a joke about ‘a man in a dark alley,
searching for his keys beneath a street lamp..’ The lamp is nowhere near where he lost his keys, but he looks there as the lamp gives him enough light to search. The joke is apt because Tautz intends taking a new line in bee research, not staying under the ‘lamp’ of accepted wisdom about how honeybees communicate. As he remarks much later on, we have been treating bees as if they were ‘dual personalities’ when it comes to their communications: one kind of ‘language’ (the ‘dance language’) within the hive, and then outside the hive, no social communication except perhaps scenting the floral source with a pheromone. The controversy which this dichotomy has engendered in honeybee research has been taken so far that exponents of Karl von Frisch’s ‘dance language’ actually dispute with exponents of Adrian Wenner’s claim that scent is the real clue for the foragers. Tautz’ new research gives a brilliant and neat solution to this dichotomy: instead of looking where the ‘light’ is (ie, in artificial research procedures such as observation hives, feeding stations, etc.), he looks to the natural abilities of honeybees as a superorganism.
In his earlier book, The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism (2008), Tautz described
the honeybee colony as ‘an integrated, independent being - a ‘superorganism’ - with its own, almost eerie, emergent group intelligence.’ I personally will never forget the excitement I felt when I read this book, especially his description of the comb itself as a channel of communication of extreme subtlety within the hive. In his new book, he reprises this earlier research as the ‘comb wide web’ which carries most of the communication within the hive. Communication between Honeybees expands our understanding to include the world outside the hive as well. Tautz clearly explains that there is a serious ‘blind spot’ in the artifically constructed research models which have been available to earlier researchers, whose work he also appreciates and explains. Indeed, much of this book reports the exact methods of earlier research. This is very useful for the reader because it enables us to be led step by step to the real-life situation of a honeybee colony. Tautz’ other recent publication, Honeybees, (with Ingo Arndt’s photographs, 2021) is about freeliving bees in their natural environment of a forest. The theme of this new book, specifically on communication between honeybees, complements it and gives us deeper understanding of these remarkable insects.
Tautz carefully constructs his case, that there is a ‘blind spot’ in the analysis most beekeepers
have been taught to accept; viz. that the bees are literally directed to a particular place in the landscape where there is food by the ‘Bee Dance’ which returning foragers perform within the hive. He is careful to explain exactly how Karl von Frisch came to the conclusion that this is what happens when bees recruit worker foragers inside the hive to visit a source of nectar or pollen. Tautz describes von Frisch’s research and shows how brilliantly he arrived at this hypothesis. However, Tautz shows that von Frisch himself actually narrowed his focus to just the two points which he could witness - one, on the comb in the observation hive, the dance to send the foragers out; and two, their arrival at feeding stations he had set up. Von Frisch assumed that the dance was the key communication required to direct the foragers all the way to the food. However, as Tautz points out, this ignored the importance of a crucial middle step in the process, namely the flights of the bees between the hive and the target flowers or feeders. To address this ‘blind spot’, he proposes a three-step process: ‘send - search - attract’, whereby the bees achieve their aim. The bee dance only involves the ‘send’ phase. Even the question of ‘attraction’ to scented or unscented feeders was given little attention, and the ‘search’ phase, none at all.
Tautz’ exploration of the neglected ‘search’ phase and its importance in understanding
honeybee communication is a brilliant new insight, vastly enhancing our understanding of
the superorganism’s complexity.
The detection of this ‘blind spot’ in the analysis reflects the artificiality of the conditions under
which most research on bees has been carried out. The observation hives, the feeding stations, do not mirror the real world of the bees; as Tautz trenchantly remarks, ‘In researching the recruiting mechanism, it helps to think like a bee.’ His recent work has concentrated more on free-living bees as forest creatures. He objects to the inferred ‘split personality’ view of bees : ‘In the hive, they behave as social insects, but underway in the field as solitary insects that at most leave a scent signal on the flowers they visit.’ As he shows, this bifurcated view assumed that the bee dance could convey precise instructions as to the distance and direction to the treasure. He provides a wonderfully wiggly diagram of the actual dance, achieved by optical tracing with highly sensitive methods within the hive. Clearly this gives a good enough ‘send’ message in the right direction, but it is hardly the GPS. However he notes that such sensitive methods would not have been available to earlier bee researchers, hence the vastly over-simplified diagrams we all know.
Having carefully established that the ‘search’ phase has been neglected, Tautz is now in a position to investigate just how bees comunicate in the field, and this is the truly fascinating
and original climax of the book. Tautz brings our attention to the behaviour of bees when they swarm, which has recently been studied by Tom Seeley, and by Tautz himself. He describes the dual inputs of scent and sight which the bees experience in a swarm, and builds on this to show how bees use both these abilities to communicate with each other as they fly to and from the nectar source. I was intrigued to read of the ‘plume’ of pheromone which follows the flying bee as she exposes her scent glands to guide her sisters on the way. The very stroke of her wings will create a particular vortex in the air which keeps them in communication. [I was reminded that their close relatives, the ants, lay pheromone trails for communication.] Further, Tautz shows that the inexperienced foragers could also use their eyes to home in on the target where they see their sisters have already gathered. In short, both scent and sight keep the bees in communication with each other throughout. As he remarks, there is still so much more to learn about this newlyopened field of bee research with ideas from sociobiology.
I cannot overstate how carefully Tautz makes his case and gives his new analysis of bee
communication. As I mentioned, he fully acknowledges earlier research; the long controversy
between the von Frisch ‘dance’ school and the Wenner ‘scent’ school, is also noted and then is allowed to die away, with the resolution provided by his new hypothesis.
I believe that this book is an essential read for anybody who is interested in honeybees, but it is also of great interest to a more general readership who may wish to understand more about the amazing world of social insects.
Book Review by Mary Montaut
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