For more than 40 years, scientists have known that honeybees communicate with one another through the language of dance. One bee flies around in loops and wags its rear end in patterns that can tell other members of the hive where to find food. Honeybees in different parts of the world perform the dance a little differently, according to a team of Australian, German, and Chinese researchers. And now the scientists say they’ve discovered that bees can even learn the dance language of their cousins from another continent.
The researchers carefully examined an Asian species and a European species of honeybee separately to determine that they used different “dialects” of the dance—in other words, they sent the same messages with slightly different dance moves. Then the scientists placed the two groups together for as long as 50 days, and after only a few tries, the European and Asian bees learned to communicate. The first time Asian worker bees watched a European bee dance, they didn’t fly far enough toward the food because the two species communicate distance differently. But the second time, researchers say, most Asian workers had learned the European bee language and found the food source right away.
When settling down for a bite to eat, wild starlings like a little privacy—and they’re smart enough to know when they’ve got it. A recent study shows that wild starlings won’t touch their food if a human is looking at it, but don’t mind so much when a human is close but averting his 
