Communicative coordination in bees

Abstract

Bees are important pollinators for plants, which would not be able to produce fruits without them. Since Karl von Frisch's work it has been evident that the highly complex social behaviour of bee swarms is organised and coordinated by sign-mediated interactions, i.e. communication. If communication processes are disturbed this may have fatal consequences for bee colonies. As in every other natural language the same sign sequences may have different meanings in different contexts. This means that bees with a limited repertoire of signs can transport different messages which trigger different response behaviours with far-reaching consequences. As in every other natural language, bee languages also differ in habitat-dependent dialects. The language of honey bees in colder hemispheres is the only known non-human language which uses body movements that represent symbolic meaning functions.