JAMES NIEH

Explore & Discover with James Nieh:
Communication in Bees

In His Words: Communication and Bees

I began as a physics major, moved into biochemistry, and then a short stint in medieval history before finding that I truly loved studying animal behavior. My awakening was as an undergraduate at Harvard where I enrolled in an animal behavior course taught by Bert Hoelldobler. Through this course I realized that I was interested in issues of animal intelligence and cognition. Because communication allows us a window into the "animal mind," it is an extremely useful approach to understanding how animals perceive their environment and how they ultimately process and use such information. Reflect on the importance of communication to our own mental processes. We talk about our ideas and thoughts, even to ourselves, in waking life and in dreams. The process of communication is intimately linked with cognition and intelligence.

When choosing a senior thesis project, I therefore looked for one that would allow me to explore sophisticated animal communication. It seems rather strange when you survey animal communication systems to realize that only humans and highly social bees possess a sophisticated symbolic communication system. In fact, symbolic communication was thought to be one of the unique traits of human language and intelligence before the discovery of the honey bee dance language. I decided to study honeybee acoustic communication and focused on a poorly understand signal known as the stop signal or "begging call." Through this research, I met my future advisor, Tom Seeley, at Cornell University, who suggested that I look into the evolution of symbolic bee communication by researching the poorly understood communication systems of stingless bees. In collaboration with David Roubik at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, I began my studies on a Panamanian stingless bee, Melipona panamica. I discovered that this bee is able to very accurately communicate the 3-dimensional location of a good food source. It was especially exciting to discover that this bee has a unique ability to symbolically code for height by using sounds produced while it recruits inside the nest.

I am still on the quest to understand how the amazing recruitment systems of the highly social bees (honey bees and stingless bees) have evolved. There is a great deal to learn since we know very little about the communication systems and life histories of the hundreds of stingless bee species.

Contact James Nieh at jnieh@ucsd.edu