>> Or could it be they are simply homing in on
>> their particular hive scents?

> For reasons given -- lack of any apparent confusion or searching
> behaviour -- and observing occasions where abandonment fails, such
> as after several days of confinement or during light flows, I have
> concluded that explanation to be unlikely.

Well, let's plug what we know in, and see what lights up:

a) Too many people have marked too many entire colonies of bees
   at each bee's emergence with little number tags and tracked
   their travels within the hive and in/out the entrance for
   there to be any but the smallest chance that orientation
   flights are taken earlier than the literature claims.
   1,000 grad students can't be wrong.

b) I'm guessing that supers are never too far removed from
   the hive to which they "belonged" when one does abandonment,
   but I'm also guessing that for any one pallet, supers will
   often be closer to another hive entrance than to the
   entrance of the hive to which they "belonged".

c) Anyone who has worked with pheromone lures knows that one
   can attract bees from quite a distance to the lure, the
   fingers that handled the lure, the shirt pocket that held
   the lure for all of 3 minutes, and so on.

   It would not be unreasonable to presume that, over the distance
   that supers would be removed from their hives, it would be "easy"
   for any bee to pick out the "hive odor" or "queen odor" of its
   own hive, even among 4 or 8 different hives, some even closer to
   the bee than the bee's "home" hive.  At minimum, it is a certainty
   that the bees can pick up the scent of at least one hive, even if
   not their "home".

   I have been known to bring a few of these lures to beekeeping
   workshops in sealed cigar tubes, and sneak them one by one into
   unsuspecting shirt pockets just before and during the talks about
   how bees "know their own hive" and "know their own queen" by
   pheromones.  It is amusing to see just how many bees show no
   "hive loyalty" at all, being attracted by the first pheromone
   lure they detect.  It is even more fun to watch the lecturer
   squirm when the obvious questions are asked in light of the
   actual behavior being demonstrated by the bees at hand.

d) But the most important factor (in my view) is that these
   bees were in a super - the bees are "house bees".  When
   approaching any entrance, they will be very subservient,
   offering no evasiveness, challenge or fight to the guard
   bees.  Shake a few bees from a frame from a super onto the
   entrance of another hive, and watch the surprising lack of
   violence that results as they enter a hive that you know
   to not be "their" hive.  Again, bees consistently demonstrate
   that "drifting" between hives is not an anomaly at all.

So, if you carried some supers further away from the hives
to which they belonged, you would have a better set-up to
gather data to support or refute your conclusion.

Even better if you set supers from a colony "dark" bees
among hives of nothing but "light" bees or visa versa.

The only known mechanism by which a large fraction
of house bees could make it back to "their" hive, or
any hive, would be by detecting and following pheromones
(or "hive odor", if you must use the term).

I'm going to go with the "known mechanism", rather than
a "hitherto unknown mechanism", on the grounds that
bees consistently follow simply rules and merely appear
to be doing something much more complex, deep, or
intelligent.

A divergent point of view is quoted below from a well-known
author of ad-hoc unintentional epistemological poetry:

   "As we know,
   There are known knowns.
   There are things we know we know.
   We also know
   There are known unknowns.
   That is to say
   We know there are some things
   We do not know.
   But there are also unknown unknowns,
   The ones we don't know
   We don't know."

   - US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
     Feb. 12, 2002 DOD news briefing



              jim (There is a real book entitled
                   "Pitbulls for Dummies".
                   Even more of a disaster just
                   waiting to happen than
                   "Beekeeping For Dummies"?)

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