the biggest mystery is not why we humans developed language, but why nobody else did

THE BEE LANGUAGE

Two thousand years ago the Poet Virgil wrote a book about bees and the joys of bee-keeping; in classic Latin but largely childish fables. Although the insect has been studied for ages, the whole story and the true story of its wonderful ways is not yet half told. In 1901, Count Maeterlinck's famous "The Life of the Bee", proclaimed honeybees to be so human-like and intelligent that they had a language -- an idea ridiculed by John Burroughs, the naturalist, and other scientists.

Experiments by a professor at the University of Munich, Karl von Frisch, have proven that the facts about bees are more amazing than any of the many romantic poems and melodramatic fables. For instance, a worker bee which has discovered a new supply of food can, after her return to the inside of the hive, in total darkness, give other workers precise information about it and its location!

Only a bare outline can be given here but the many marvels of bee language are told in fascinating detail by von Frisch in a little book published by Cornell University
Press.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/300-399/nb337.htm

UCR Entomologists Report Bee-Dancing Brings More Food To Honeybee Colonies
Source: University Of California - Riverside
Date: 2002-12-16

"The dance language is the most complex example of symbolic communication in any animal other than primates," said Visscher. "Our study is the first test of the adaptive value of the dance language. It provides insights that may be of use in manipulating foraging behavior of honeybees for pollination of crops."

There has been a long-simmering controversy over whether the direction and distance information in the dance is actually decoded by the recruits which follow the dances, or whether recruitment is based on the recruits learning only the odor food source from the dancer, and subsequently searching out the food based on odor alone. Several experiments have been published that have convinced most scientists that the bees can decode the direction and distance information, but the relative role of odor and location information has remained in question.

To test the effect of the information in the dance, Sherman and Visscher turned the normally vertical beehive on its side. With the combs horizontal, there was no upward reference for the dancer to use in orienting her waggle runs, and it performed disoriented dances, in which the waggle runs pointed in all directions. To experimentally restore dance information, the experimenters provided a directional light source, which the bees interpreted as the sun. The bees proceeded to do well-oriented dances at the angle relative to the light.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021216071100.htm