James Fischer wrote, << Google "bees airborne sound", and you'll find a number of good studies showing that bees can hear airborne sound, and that it has an important role in their lives, such as this one:
Journal of Comparative Physiology A
January 1991, Volume 168, Issue 1, pp 85-89
Hearing in honeybees: operant conditioning and spontaneous reactions to airborne sound
Kirchner, Dreller, Towne
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00217106 >>
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It depends what one understands by “hearing”. I would maintain that perception of vibration is generally understood to be something other than hearing. The link given leads to a 39$ pay wall so I would refer to a more recent study, Michael Hrncir, Friedrich G. Barth and Ju¨rgen Tautz
http://www.bienenforschung.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/uploads/media/Vibratory_and_Airborne-Sound_Signals_01.pdf
from which I quote.
“It has been suggested that airborne sound (air particle velocity) together with
thoracic vibrations induce vibration of the receiver’s antennae, and that the bees, similar to flies, do
use the Johnston’s organ to detect air particle oscillations evoked by the bees’ “sounds”. This
mechanism of “sound” perception was proposed for honeybees (Kirchner et al., 1991; Dreller
and Kirchner, 1993, 1995), for stingless bees (Nieh et al., 2003) and for bumble bees (Hensen and
Kirchner, 2003).”
The term “sound perception” is used throughout and is more appropriate than “hearing” the implication is that it was also used in previous studies including Kirchner et al.
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