Dear BEE-L
         Peter Borst and others have been discussing stingless bee 
communication of location of food sources, especially in the rain forest 
canopy where the vertical component is so necessary. Peter cited a 1971 
book by Lindauer. BEE-L readers should also be directed to the much more 
recent work of Prof. James Nieh, now at UCSD. He has shown that sound and 
vibrations also play a vital role in communicating elevation information. 
Here's a quote from Prof. Nieh's web site 
<http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/faculty/nieh.html>
"A recruiting forager produces a series of pulsed sounds when she unloads 
her food to other bees and when she begins to make clockwise and 
counterclockwise dance movements (Nieh 1998B). During the food-unloading 
phase, she produces longer sound pulses for a food source on the canopy 
floor than for one 40 m up in the canopy. During the dance phase, sound 
pulse duration is positively correlated with increasing distance of the 
food source from the nest (Nieh & Roubik 1998). Thus M. panamica foragers 
appear to use sounds to communicate food height and distance."
Professor Nieh gave a wonderful talk on his work some years ago (when he 
was at Harvard as a post doc) to our Bee Club, the Middlesex County 
Beekeepers Association.
         Ernie Huber


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