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Date: | Sun, 2 Nov 2003 19:14:24 -0800 |
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Barry Donovan wrote:
>Jim [Fischer] says dance information is never accurate enough to point to a
>specific tree. Well I don't know whether humans could expect to get
>as much accurancy out of a bee dance as a follower bee might, but
>many people have claimed that they can obain sufficient infomation
>to get pretty close to the
>indicated food source. Even if the dance information isn't all that
>accurate for a new forager, once within cooee [ ??? ] it will
>encounter a plume of the same scent as carried by the dancing bee,
>which it need only
>follow in the manner indicated by Adrian Wenner to arrive at the flowers.
*********
Perhaps few BEE-L subscribers are bothering to follow this thread
anymore (though I hope they do) -- a simple exercise could settle the
issue in their minds.
Barry is now in a country that approaches summertime. He should
easily be able to train 5 (five) marked forages to collect mildly
scented sugar solution at a feeding station located 500 meters/yards
DOWNWIND from a bee colony and allow no unmarked bees to return from
that station to their colony.
I can predict that he will obtain essentially no new recruits to
that station during a three-hour period -- "bee language" or not.
See Figure 4 in the following URL:
http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/abjnov1998b.htm
Of course, he would have to work in a setting where wind direction
is fairly steady, since light winds tend to be more variable.
By contrast, he can repeat that experiment with a station 500
meters/yards located UPWIND from the hive. I can predict that he
will get a very different set of results (as revealed in Figure 3 of
the above URL).
And, Jim can readily duplicate such an experiment next season when
forage becomes scarce.
Will either Barry or Jim (or any other bee language advocate)
conduct such a simple experiment? I can predict that they will not
do so. I can also predict that if they do so, they will not share
their results with the rest of us.
Adrian
--
Adrian M. Wenner (805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road [log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA 93103 www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm
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* "We not only believe what we see:
* to some extent we see what we believe."
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* Richard Gregory (1970)
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