>> It depends what one understands by "hearing".

> the ability to receive signals is quite distinct 
> from the ability to assign meaning to them

So Matthew got it right.
Matthew 13:13:
"Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and
hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."

So, a parable:
One afternoon in the 1990s, Wyatt Mangum (who writes for ABJ, and teaches
Math at Mary Washington College in VA) and I walked from colony to colony in
his shed where he kept a dozen or so single-comb colonies for experiments,
and attached a transducer to the top bar of each comb, feeding it a very
cleaned up digitized recording of queen piping.  The bees reacted exactly as
one expected, they "froze" whenever the tones sounded and moved normally
between notes.  (For those who have never heard it, go here:
https://archive.org/details/QueenBeesPiping )  The effect on the bees was
fascinating, as with repeated tones, a queen pipe that never ended, their
motion was "stroboscopic", stop-go-stop-go-stop-go for as long as I left the
digitized audio loop looping.

We expected this, so once we confirmed 100% compliance with expected
reality, we then held a small 2-inch speaker of the sort one would expect in
a circa 1965 palm-sized  "Transistor Radio".  We played the same sound.  The
bees nearest the speaker reacted the same as if the transducer was vibrating
the entire comb, those further away took no notice.

While this easy-to-run experiment succinctly addresses both the concern
about detection of airborne sounds, and the ability to assign specific
meaning to them, we did not publish this, as we did not question that bees
could both "hear" and "understand" what they heard.  

The big idea here was to keep an entire colony "immobilized" through the
exploitation of this behavior, so that they could be worked without fear of
stings, and we messed with the concept for a while, but the sound levels
required to truly immobilize an entire hive were the sort of levels not
produced since the last stadium performance of the band Emerson, Lake, and
Palmer. My math said that the beekeeper's ears would have bled after working
the hive.  So, the product was never released as a beekeeping product.  I
mentioned it the Fischer Alchemy 2002 Annual Report as "Meditational Bee
Calming":
http://bee-quick.com/rpt2/index.html

...but somehow, no one ever understands that I am never kidding, even when I
am joking.

But the work was not without reward.  Today, both military and law
enforcement agencies occasionally use what they call "LRAD", which is
produced under license by a buddy of mine.  Yes, we did revoke the license
of the agencies that used LRAD against peaceful protests at the G20 meeting
held in Pittsburgh, and the license agreement has been tightened to prohibit
any use where specific widespread violence is not actively  underway.  The
manufacturer has added video cameras to each unit so that the violence is
documented before and while each unit is used.

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