Peter Dillon said:

>> "The combs that act as "dance floors" are nearly always chewed away
>> from the bottom bar of the frame,....... reduces the damping" effect of
>> the frame on vibrations, and results in better propagation of vibrations
>> across the comb."

> How would frames that have plastic sheets acting as foundation react in
> damping or not of vibrations generated by bees?

I dunno, as I do not use plastic foundation in brood combs, but I do
use it for supers.  Call me old-fashioned, but I use the old wired wax
approach for brood comb, if for no other reason than to avoid offending
the ghosts of the old-timers that taught me the craft.  :)

I do have data to back up my pig-headedness, since anyone can mix
plastic foundation and wax foundation in the same super or brood chamber,
and see which is drawn out first.  Around here, wax wins every time on
speed, but plastic foundation survives the extractor and rough handling better.

I'd suspect that wax (and/or propolis) removal along the bottom of a comb
drawn from plastic foundation would also result in "better" vibrations, since
the plastic is never "tight" in the slot of the bottom bar, and the vibrations we
are talking about are tiny.  Not much physical motion happens.  Why not
look at all the frames in a of you own few brood chambers, and tell us what
you see?

> Also, relating to "seismic" wave propagation - vibrations will react (pass or be
> inhibited) depending on the physical state of the materials held by the frame -
> nectar, liquid honey, crystallized honey etc.

In my experience, dancing is most often done on comb that is NOT filled with
honey, when the bees have a choice in the matter.  Others who have looked
at such things for longer than I would be better able to answer how often
bees might dance on "filled" comb, be it honey, brood, or whatever.

> How would a bee facilitate it's analysis of what the "dancing bee" is trying to
> communicate on a variable sound board?

I'm not sure what you mean by "variable sound board".  The sound board
can be assumed to be non-variable, at least for the duration of any one
dance.

> Bees follow a dancer on the comb - why?

To learn the dance steps?  :)

One clue might be that vibrations do not travel very far on comb.
In fact, most "dance" vibrations do not even resonate across the
entire comb.  From what I've measured, I'd guess that one would
need a guitar pickup and a magnet about every 3 inches along the
length of a comb to get decent-quality waveforms on ALL dances
done on a comb, regardless of where they are done.

I simply ignore dances that are too far away from the magnet/pickup
to generate a "clean signal", as I cannot expect a beekeeper to bother
to buy or wire up a multichannel amplifier and mixer, or a recording
scheme that would gather data from multiple sensors.  I can't even
be bothered myself, and I know that we have a 16-channel Teac audio
mixer around here somewhere, and that audio gear is fine for the
frequencies at issue.

> Can bees be supplied with an odourous sugar solution - which they will then
> leave the hive to try and find. - allowing specific nectars to be collected/ plants
> to be pollinated?

Well, I "flavor" my sugar syrup with a little anise, and I have yet to ever
see a crowd at my wife's anise plants in the herb garden...   :)

While it would be nice to feed one's bees a desirable nectar, and have
them focus on that plant as a result, the problem is that foragers act
as "food critics", and only make enthusiastic "nectar dances" about
gathered nectar that both has a high sugar content and is readily available
from the plants NOW.  Any attempt to "advertise" a food source that is not
really all that good at the moment is doomed to failure, since it is multiple
dances by multiple returning foragers that recruit enough bees to gather some
serious poundage.  In short, bees dance based upon what they find in the field,
and if you put a feeder on, the feeder becomes a unique food source in its own
right, rather than a way to "fool" the bees.

This approach would be a good test to disprove or prove the "odor" theory,
since it could be done only when the target plants are known to be at maximum
nectar production, but no one is terribly interested in disproving the "flat earth"
theory either.  One's paper gets rejected as "obvious".

> It would seem logical that there is a mechanism that is dominated by direction
> and distance used by bees, followed by use of another sense on arrival in the
> desired locality.
> Dance for the former, odour once in the locality!
> Back in the hive, distance and direction communicated by dance, and that
> information backed up by odour.

Your speculation is very plausible, but that is not what was proposed
by the pre-print posted.  The pre-print paper claimed that "dance" was
nothing but an "attention-getter", and not "communication" at all, a claim
that I feel lacks credible supporting data.

Your speculation is a better perspective on the situation, in that it gives
reasonable weights to the influence of both components ("dance" and
"odor"), and proposes a plausible mechanism that "makes sense"
on a functional level.  It also proposes a mixed truth, which is how "The
Truth" seems to work most often.

        jim