Tim Vaughan said:
> Now I understand why bees seem to watch the dancer, even
> in a pitch black beehive. The dancer is showering the scent
> of the food source on to the scent receptive organs of the
> potential recruits.
There is no question that this could be a component of the
recruitment process, but is it mission-critical?
Is it even required?
There are very easy ways to find out. (I think I may have
mentioned this before.) I offer this as a direct challenge
to all and sundry, as there is nothing preventing any interested
beekeeper from performing these experiments at a cost of
roughly a buck ninety-eight:
1) Load up a few observation hives.
2) Chill down one set of bees, remove antennas with
a very tiny pair of wire cutters, and attach those
little numbered tags to each bee. (Disgusting and
cruel, but so is letting a colony die as a "control"
in a varroa study. I have a hard time with letting
bees die or mutilating any of God's creatures, which
is why I would make a lousy entomologist or biologist.)
3) Allow the colonies to forage. Set up a few feeding
dishes, track visitors, video-tape dances, and compare.
4) If odor is mission-critical to recruitment, the colony
without antennae should clearly show "no recruitment",
or "much less recruitment" than colonies with antennae.
5) The reaction of bees to dancing should be "different"
between the colonies "with" and "without" antennae,
so one might want to video-tape the dances on normal
colonies as a "control".
Here's another good test that might be done by the same
experimenter as a contrasting test:
1) Take a cheap vibration source, such as a back massager
like this one
http://www.conair.com/Products/detail.jsp?productID=108
and set one of the observation hives on it.
2) Turn on the massager. You are now "jamming" the
vibration made by the dancing foragers with a
constant and much larger-amplitude vibration.
Leave it on for a few days. Turn it off for
a few days. Compare and contrast what happens.
3) If vibration is a mission-critical part of the
communication mechanism (generally agreed to
be an essential component of "dance"), this
should foul up the ability of dancers to recruit
as many additional foragers as would be recruited
without the "jamming".
4) Record observations and data as above.
5) Anyone needing help with details can contact me.
I'd be happy to not only help with the design of
the experiment and the number-crunching, but to
also arm-twist various big-name researchers into
reviewing and tweaking the design to insure that
it is 100% bulletproof.
Gosh, all the talk, all the argument, and there has yet
to be a single "put up or shut up" experiment like these
to settle the issue once and for all.
Why? Well, I guess that the "dance" faction feels that
the issue is settled, and does not need to be "proven"
any more than it is, and the "non-dance" faction is
simply unwilling to approach the issue head-on in a
direct manner.
And don't try and tell me that I am the first one to
think up a simple and low-budget way to test this stuff.
That won't fly. I'm a mere beekeeper.
What if one could prove that odor IS mission-critical,
and vibration is NOT mission-critical? Well, you'd
certainly get your name in genuine print, and you'd
likely also get a few free trips to address beekeeper
meetings about your findings.
You'd be FAMOUS!!
...yet another good reason why I'm not doing this myself.
But until someone has done an actual experiment, I'm
not going to respect ANY armchair analysis on this topic.
Including mine. :)
jim (I just described the "odor versus dance"
question as an "In-Flight Fellini Movie"
to an employee who just asked why I was
typing rather than sitting in on a
conference call.)
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