> Belief in bee language is really an emotional issue. Not so much for those who think that there is sufficient evidence to support bee language. It appears to only be "emotional" for those who propose that the mass of evidence gathered to date is insufficient. > If those who believe in bee language were firm in their > belief system, they would merely shrug off counter arguments. This is an apt description of the reaction of the scientific community as a whole to the counter-arguments offered to date. I would tend to use the term "yawn" rather than "shrug", but it is likely that some people both yawn and shrug. Those of us who do not participate in peer review (such as beekeepers) are different, in that we find such discussions entertaining and educational, and don't have any concerns about "reputations". But let's ignore the meta-discussion of how someone might be biased in one way or another, and focus on more tangible issues. Let's even ignore the bees for a moment, and ask an easier question about "odor" itself. If bees don't use "dance information" at all, and only use "odor", as Adrian insists, how do we explain the behavior of bees in regard to odorless plants and odorless nectar? In the paper "Why Are Some Floral Nectars Scented?" (Robert A. Raguso of USC in "Ecology", 85(6), 2004, pp. 1486-1494), which can be found in full in this compendium: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~irwinlab/papers/Irwin_et_al_2004_SF_Intro.pdf Robert states: "Here I confirm the presence of scent in the nectar of four out of seven angiosperm species sampled with solid-phase micro-extraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry." So if only 4 out of 7 nectars sampled had an odor detectable with SPME GC/MS, a very high-tech approach to detecting chemicals at very low levels, how do the other 3 plants get pollinated, and how did they survive in the highly-competitive Darwinian scheme of things? Clearly, the evidence of flower visual displays, including the unique displays visible only under UV light provides evidence that bees and other pollinators use their eyes. Sure, odor can help, but it is clearly not the only cue. In some cases, it does not even appear to be a minor part of the process, such as in the case where the nectar is odorless, thus making any odor-based scenario for forager recruitment more than a little implausible. (And please, let's not drag out "location odor" until someone can explain how one specific "location" might smell different from another, and how one versus another could be found, given a hive as a starting point.) So, what percentage of plants that provide nectar have an odor at all? No one seems to know at present, but even a small number of such plants present significant hurdles to any proposed foraging and recruitment scheme where odor might be claimed to be mission-critical to the process. I have "faith" that everyone will see the "reasoning" here. I have faith IN reasoning. :) Search the archives often at http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?S1=bee-l