How did bees evolve to be able to communicate through dance?

When a bee finds pollen, it often comes back to the hive and dances for the other bees. All the rest watch and they can tell, from the dance, the direction and distance (I think) of the pollen.



How did the bees evolve to get this trait? Even if one of them got a gene that made it understand direction and distance relative to the sun (and somehow it was able to keep up with the fact that the sun moves during the year), then did all the other bees evolve to understand it too? how did this work? Thanks for your answers!

How did bees evolve to be able to communicate through dance?
That's lame... giving the credit to evolution, a force only proven as far as the scientists who concocted the notion. No chance God could've created them that way, huh?
Reply:First, they took 32101: Basic Dance, 38105: Performance Seminar, and 54105: Vectors. The following semester, they studied 54102: Topography and 32201: Intermediate Dance. 32201 included a significant section on Interpretive Dance, which is revisited in greater depth in 61301: Motion and Distance. This course is taken at the same time as 55202: Triangulation and 29307: Cartography. A choice of two (2) of the following is required: 66202: Pollen Recognition; 64201: Flowers; 67204: Nutrition. Finally, in a semester of only upper-level courses, they put it together with 95406: Advanced Directional Dance and 97402: Senior Dance Thesis. Bees graduating with a GPA of 3.3 or higher get to wear an Honors Cord at the commencement ceremony.



Your quesiton is interesting. I gave it a star.
Reply:Cool question! Seems like a good argument against evolution. The way to think about it from a darwinian point of view is that they didnt evolve the ability to dance, they evolved the mental capacity to create and understand this system.



i have no idea how this could have happend, but 'tiny changes over millions of years' who knows whats possible



the bee dance is really cool. They waggle in the direction of the honey, and then spin in a circle, and the longer they spin, the further away it is. so its not a very complicated dance.



i really think behavior is the hardest thing to explain evolution wise.
Reply:You do not have ONE get the gene. Populations evolve, not individuals. I am not going to get into it with you tonight, as you obviously have an agenda. Go here end learn.



PS Last nights, 10^500 " abstraction " leads me to believe otherwise. This information is easily gotten on the web. Try Von Frishe.



http://www.beekeeping.com/

articles/us/bee_dance_2.htm
Reply:There is a weirdness with bees, since the workers are all the daughters of the queen. Since they are all related, and only the queen breeds, one can view tham as a single organism, which EASILY COMMUNICATES WITH ITSELF.



Clear?
Reply:I think it happened in the disco era. All the bees were doing really different dances. Then one bee started making fun of the rest by doing the robot. All the bees stopped dancing and realized that John Beevolta was the only one that knew how to dance well and he taught the others.
Reply:Personally, I believe God made it that way. This question may add to arguments in favor of "intelligent design."



Edit:

In an evolutionary sense, perhaps a bee started to develop a way to communicate, and those who could not started to die out as the more in touch bees found food faster than the others.
Reply:I'm not any kind of bee expert, but I do know that evolution has to involve small steps that eventually add up to one big behavior. I think the first step is an excitable bee that consistently does something odd when he gets back to the nest. This would attract more bees than usual, although some bees would be attracted anyway, since he's got some pollen on him from the last trip. Soon hives that have bees that do "something odd" would be favored. Then hives that developed bees that noticed that odd thing would be selected for, since they would send out more bees to the food source. Once the odd behavior and the noticing behavior was established, it wouldn't matter if the dancing bee was covered in pollen or not. Then the actual meanings of the dance steps could evolve. Again this is just conjecture.



According to Wikipedia, all honey bees species have dances, but different versions, so it must have evolved early in some proto-honey bee or before.
Reply:Give me strength.



First of all, let's de-anthropomorphize your ideas about "dance." With respect to bees, the "dance" is simply what we humans say they do. It looks like a dnace to us, so we call it that. From the bees point of view, this may not be the same as some tribe of pygmies acting out a hunt before they all take to the bush next morning.



Indeed, there have been enough studies to establish a relationship between the movements, circumference and duration of a bee "dance" and the location of pollen (NOT "honey" as one respondent said). But exactly how this all fits together is still not really understood. It is entirely possible that bee dance -as dance- has nothing to do with it; it may be that the so-called "dance" is simply a way to spin off chemical markers that hit the other bees and give them targeting information. The further away the target pollen or more complex the trail, the more jitter-bugging it takes to move the data across bee-space. And so, the dance is a visual indicator of what may otherwise be an invisible process (for now). I just made that up; point being, we need MORE DATA.



Evolution. Denial of it is like denial of air. Evolution does not denote some programmatic expression or manifestation of biological adpatability or superiority. It simply, as a scientific discipline, is a way of tracing how things got to be the way they are. Delete "evolution" and use "change" if you like. Since most (apparently) changes ended up in disaster for the species involved, it should be obvious, to the normal mind, that the changes that actually worked tended to maintain the viability of the species, even to the point that they, themselves, changed enough to earn the title of a new "species." This is what I would call, "Stupid Design." Since most things in nature don't even know about themselves, the only way to move along (survive) is to have the advantage of a change that worked -one among zillions that did NOT.



In the case of the bee -as with everything else- certain adaptations evolved which tended to support the species. Bit by bit (or maybe a sudden shock from some cosmic event -who knows?) these puppies behaved in ways that made them successful. That's all there is.



Is there an intelligent mind behind all of this? I personally think there is a God who tolerates me, but that has nothing to do with the mechanics involved. On the other hand, reverent study of just what is going on will probably tell us more about our creator. The idea that it is a puppet show he whipped up one night in a sugar rush, however, I find offensive. Even if it is true.



So, if you wanna know how the bees "know," keep lokking -guess where- at the bees!