On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 6:24 PM, Peter Loring Borst <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> A friend suggests the books of Tom Seeley.
>
> Honeybee Democracy is very interesting, and accessible.
>

I wholeheartedly agree.  (Although I must say that one of your other picks,
BeeEconomy was not an easy read for me).

Mentioning Honeybee Democracy made me think about how I enjoyed reading
about the rigorous experimentation that Seeley did to understand and test
his hypotheses.  And that made me think about a paper by David De Jong that
also used a very beautifully designed experiment to test the effects of
magnetoreception in bees on comb orientation.

Orientation of comb building by honeybees by D De Jong - ‎1982 -
<http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00612015>

link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00612015
But this is only the abstract.  I do have the whole paper somewhere, but I
can't remember who sent it to me.

I wondered what has happened since 1982 on this subject and searched it.  I
came up with this paper

http://www.academia.edu/2499240/An_Experiment_on_Comb_Orientation_by_Honey_Bees_Hymenoptera_Apidae_in_Traditional_Hives

The whole paper is available there.  At first read I thought the experiment
was pretty well designed, but it did not support magnetoreception as having
importance in comb orientation.

A lot of famous bee researchers have weighed in on this subject,
 Gould, Lindauer, Martin, De Jong (magnetoreception favourers)
 Owens, Taber, (orientation based on nest entrance position )
 Seeley, Morse  (orientation based on neither of above, but their paper
precedes De Jong)

So, Seeley, Morse and De Jong were all at Cornell University.  Does anyone
know whether De Jong's experiment and paper of 1982 changed their mind?
It has been 33 years since De Jong's paper, but this paper from Ethiopia is
recent and seems fairly rigorous.

Stan

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