Is bee dance a language?

Bees are the only species other than humans that have been shown to be capable of communicating detailed information about their spatial surroundings to conspecifics. By performing a stereotyped 'dance' in the nest, the bee provides its nestmate with the spatial coordinates of a distant food source, such that the nestmate can subsequently travel there independently. This behaviour has famously been described as a language, and has been studied behaviourally for many years, but only recently have plausible neural models to explain this behaviour been proposed. I will discuss how this new understanding gives us insight into the nature (and possibly the limits) of the communication capabilities of an insect brain.