The Journal of Heredity 2002:93(3)
© 2002 The American Genetic Association 93:170-173
Genetic Control of the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Dance Language: Segregating Dance Forms in a Backcrossed Colony
From the Department of Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland 4811, Australia (Johnson and Crozier) and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia (Oldroyd and Barron).
Address correspondence to Ross H. Crozier at the address above or e-mail: ross.crozier{at}jcu.edu.au.
We studied the genetic control of the dance dialects that exist in the different subspecies of honey bees (Apis mellifera) by observing the variation in dance form observed in a backcross between two lines that showed widely different dance dialects. To do this we generated the reciprocal of the cross performed by Rinderer and Beaman (1995), thus producing phenotypic segregation of dance forms within a single colony rather than between colonies. Our results are consistent with Rinderer and Beaman (1995) in that inheritance of the transition point from round dancing 
waggle dancing is consistent with control by a single locus with more than one allele. That is, we found one dance type to be dominant in the F1, and observed a 1:1 segregation of dance in a backcross involving the F1 and the recessive parent. However, we found some minor differences in dance dialect inheritance, with the most significant being an apparent reversal of dominance between our cross (for us "black" is the dominant dialect) and that of Rinderer and Beaman (1995) (they report "yellow" to be the dominant dialect). We also found that our black bees do not perform a distinct sickle dance, whereas the black bees used by Rinderer and Beaman (1995) did perform such a dance. However, our difference in dominance need not contradict the results of Rinderer and Beaman (1995), as there is no evidence that body color and dominance for dance dialect are linked.