Sydney, Aug 6 - In an amazing discovery about the honeybee, scientists have found that Asian and European bees are capable of learning and understanding one another's secret dance languages.

'Honeybees gauge the distance flown to a food source using a 'visual odometer' that logs the objects that flow past their vision as they fly,' explains Shaowu Zhang, chief investigator at A.R.C. Centre of Excellence in Vision Science and Australian National University (ANU).

'On their return to the hive they transfer this information to their hive-mates using a tail-waggle dance, where the speed and pattern of the beats indicates the distance and direction of the food.'

However different species of honey bee use different dances to signal the location of their food, and scientists have long debated whether the different species of honeybee were 'speaking' a different dialect, in other words logging the visual information differently - or simply using different dance styles to convey the same data.

'We also wanted to find out whether different species of honeybee can learn from, and communicate with, one another,' Zhang says.