Adrian Wenner seems not to understand that my words"this new hypothesis"
 mean that von Frsich's discovery of the honey bee dance language was an
hypothesis. There is no implication that the hypothesis has become a
fact, and so no contradiction.  In fact, when I say in my next sentence
that "von Frisch rejected his odour hypothesis in favour of his dance
language hypothesis" I have said twice that von Frisch's dance language
idea is an hypothesis.

Adrian says that the information in the dance is "terribly inaccurate".
But clearly sometimes we humans have so much trouble understanding our
written language that it isn't surprising that there may be difficulties
when we attempt to fathom the information that might be imparted between
insects by their gyrations.

In his 2002 paper The Elusive Honey Bee Dance "Language" Hypothesis
Adrian quotes Popper and Lakatos as saying in effect that a theory must
be falsifiable. My dictionary says a theory is "opposite to or opposed
to hypothesis".

According to my Concise Oxford Dictionary, an hypothesis is
"proposition made as basis for reasoning, without assumption of its
truth; supposition made as starting point for further investigation from
known facts". The starting point for my comprehensive hypothesis is that
the dance contains distance and direction information, something with
which Adrian agrees.

Adrian called my hypothesis "another ad hoc modification employed to
rescue the dance language hypothesis". It isn't, it is an idea which I
believe presents a new and different view of the whole area.

Adrian says that many recruits take a long time to reach the food, and
some never do. As an example of the application of my hypothesis, these
bees might be using the information about the location of the food to
avoid heading to the already discovered food, in order to set out in new
directions to search for Adrian's odour plumes which are emanating from
new, undiscovered sources of the same food. If in an experimental
situation there are no or just a few of these undiscovered sources, then
many bees may search for a long time before possibly giving up on what
is a fruitless search and heading for the already discovered food, or
perhaps giving up altogether.

An interesting aspect of von Frisch's approach is that in the light of
new information he had the flexibility to change his outlook. In their
1990 book on the bee `language' (ie hypothesis!) Wenner and Wells point
out how common it is for persons to become so wedded to a favorite idea
that they ignore new ideas. Well after around 30 years since the revival
of von Frisch's rejected odour hypothesis, there is now a new
`comprehensive' hypothesis. Wenner and Wells in their 1990 book showed
how the criteria that are generally accepted as indicative of the truth
change about every 30-50 or so years. Nothing is more certain than we
can look forward to even more changes in ideas about whether bees use
dance information.

Regards,
Barry Donovan
Private Bag 4704
Christchurch
New Zealand.

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