Martin Giurfa (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France) has recently evaluated this article at the Faculty of 1000 Biology. His/her comments are as follows:

"The waggle dance of honeybees is a form of ritualized behavior through which foragers advertise the existence and location of a food source to their hive mates. The original suggestion that different races of bees possess different ‘dialects’ (for example, different behavioral codes to represent the distance of a food source) has been recently challenged. This paper shows that although such different codes exist in Asian and European bees, when forced to live together, these species can decode their respective languages and respond correctly to the information conveyed by the ‘foreign’ dialect. The authors used an innovative method allowing the coexistence of Asian and European bees within the same hive, something that usually fails given the aggressive behavior that such kinds of encounter tends to elicit. They trained bees to different food sources, video recorded their dances and determined whether bees from one species could decode and respond correctly to the message of the foreign species despite using a different code. These results show that such a reciprocal communication is possible and raise fascinating questions, not answered in this work, about how exactly such a cross-species communication is achieved. When species A informs 100 meters through a behavior that for species B means 150 meters, how does species B decode the message and translate it to the appropriate distance? Which cognitive operations are performed to achieve such translation? Further experiments should answer these questions".

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Best,

Niyaz Ahmed
Section Editor, PLoS ONE
Faculty Member, F1000Biology and F1000Medicine
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