{"id":160605,"date":"2023-03-19T06:22:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-19T11:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/bees-learn-to-dance-and-to-solve-puzzles-from-their-peers"},"modified":"2023-03-19T06:22:49","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T11:22:49","slug":"bees-learn-to-dance-and-to-solve-puzzles-from-their-peers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/bees-learn-to-dance-and-to-solve-puzzles-from-their-peers","title":{"rendered":"Bees learn to dance and to solve puzzles from their peers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/bees-learn-to-dance-and-to-solve-puzzles-from-their-peers.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Social insects like bees demonstrate a remarkable range of behaviors, from working together to build structurally complex nests (complete with built-in climate control) to the pragmatic division of labor within their communities. Biologists have traditionally viewed these behaviors as pre-programmed responses that evolved over generations in response to external factors. But two papers last week reported results indicating that social learning might also play a role.<\/p>\n<p>The first, published in the journal PLoS Biology, demonstrated that bumblebees could learn to solve simple puzzles by watching more experienced peers. The <a href=\"http:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosbiology\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pbio.3002019\">second<\/a>, published in the journal Science, reported evidence for similar social learning in how honeybees learn to perform their trademark \u201cwaggle dance\u201d to tell other bees in their colony where to find food or other resources. Taken together, both studies add to a growing body of evidence of a kind of \u201cculture\u201d among social insects like bees.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCulture can be broadly defined as behaviors that are acquired through social learning and are maintained in a population over time, and essentially serves as a \u2018second form of inheritance,\u2019 but most studies have been conducted on species with relatively large brains: primates, cetaceans, and passerine birds,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/news-releases\/981218?\">said co-author Alice Bridges<\/a>, a graduate student at Queen Mary University of London who works in <a href=\"http:\/\/chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk\/Alice\/Alice.html\">the lab<\/a> of co-author <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qmul.ac.uk\/sbbs\/staff\/larschittka.html\">Lars Chittka<\/a>. \u201cI wanted to study bumblebees in particular because they are perfect models for social learning experiments. They have previously been shown to be able to learn really complex, novel, non-natural behaviors such as string-pulling both individually and socially.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social insects like bees demonstrate a remarkable range of behaviors, from working together to build structurally complex nests (complete with built-in climate control) to the pragmatic division of labor within their communities. Biologists have traditionally viewed these behaviors as pre-programmed responses that evolved over generations in response to external factors. But two papers last week [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,493,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-climatology","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}