To Gavin,
Excuse me for butting in, since your questions were not directed to me at
all.
Frankly, do not believe that any problems caused by the bees carrying the
transponders, (and being captured to attach the transponders to them in the
first place), might have produced the results Riley et al. published in
Nature (2005).
But, how do YOU explain the fact that as soon as you add a proper
control-test, with scent added to the food (which are the only conditions
under which honeybee-recruits ever find any resources in nature, and which
Riley et al. not only did not do, but deliberately avoided doing), the
ability of honeybee-recruits to use their DL, completely disappears (as
evidence by the typically invariable manner of arrival? You wouldn't want to
conclude that the essential, but ever-elusive evidence for the existence of
the honeybees DL, can be "discovered" only provided you avoid proper
control-test? You can "discover" anything you wish, if you only preclude
proper controls!
What you are actually trying to do is revise the DL hypothesis yet again.
You now suggest that round dances result in recruits using odor alone all
along. So how do you explain the fact that round dances contain the
information (which scientists can obtain), that the food is only near the
hive, within the round dance range? Of course, they use odor alone all
along, but they do so TOTALLY IRRESPECTIVE OF THE TYPE OF DANCETHEY
ATTENDED, and totally irrespective of almost any other factor (except visual
& odor cues from foragers flying back & forth from the hive to the feeder;
when recruits find themselves where they can sense such cues).
The only remaining alternative to the impossible conclusion that the the
bees tracked by Riley at al. (in Nature 2005) used a non-existent DL, is
that there was something wrong with the study. What it is, I do not know. I
might, or I might not be able to tell you more, if you only obtain for me an
answer from Mennzel, or Greggers, to my question whether the un-tracked new
beess that were observed to arrive at the site of the experimental feeder,
arrived there with, or without, an upwind zigzag? So why don't you be a nice
guy, and ask those authors the question? You could impress them with all the
information about your being a scientist. You are free to even frankly tell
them that I informed you about the existence of such bees (based on personal
information from Greggers), and that I prodded you into asking the question,
because I want to know the answer; which they never gave me.
I have no idea whether the answer might be interesting, or not, as long as I
have never even seen it. It is quite possible that those authors do not even
know the answer, i.e. that they saw those bees arrive at the feeder-site not
in the company of any of the trained foragers, but they never bothered to
observe how exactly those bees arrived. It is possible that (just like the 2
tracked bees that arrived at the site on their own), those un-tracked bees
that arrived at the site on their own, also arrived there without any upwind
zigzag. And it is possible that they arrived there with an upwind zigzag.
Only in that last case could I determine with certainty that the 2 tracked
bees that "walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck", i.e. that behaved
like re-recruited trained foragers, and not at all like regular recruits,
were indeed "ducks".
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")
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