Honeybees use a special symbol communication, the waggle dance, for sharing information in the colony about the remote food source. Karl von Frisch (Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1973) called this communication a “dance language”, as it communicates the vector information to the food source to hive mates (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Dancing language
Distance and direction information is encoded in the duration and direction of air vibration caused by the bee’s wingbeat, which consists of vibration pulses with a highly specific temporal pattern. The vibratory signals are detected and processed in the auditory pathway of the bee, starting with Johnston’s organ (JO) located at the second segment (pedicel) of the antenna (Fig. 2).
Figure 2: Johnston’s organ
We study the circuitry of auditory processing of communication signals using a combined experimental and computational approach. We obtain detailed morphological data of identified neurons in the auditory system of honeybees and use compartmental modeling to investigate the signal processing properties based on these data. Here we focus on a vibration-sensitive interneuron, DL-Int-1, located in the primary auditory center (Fig. 3). This neuron receives input from JO and responds in a specific way to the vibration pulses of waggle-dance communication signals (Ai et al 2009).
Figure 3: DL-Int-1 (green ) and JO afferents (red)
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