> Wouldn't it be something if foragers besides 
> using a visual landscape to navigate they are 
> actually using an odor landscape?  

Bill Towne of Kuztown U did some excellent experiments where hives were moved during the night before an overcast day between "mirror image" landscape arrangements, and feeders were either in the same relative compass direction, or in the opposite compass direction from the hive.  

As long as the solid cloud cover persisted, the bees were fooled by the landscape, and kept trying to forage at the "wrong" feeder in the same landscape position from the hive, ignoring the "correct" feeder that was at the proper compass heading from the hive.  But as the cloud cover broke up, and the sun shined through, the bees immediately went back to using the sun-based navigation, and foraged on the "correct" feeder that matched the dances that had been done before the hive move.  This was repeated multiple times, and the effect became more acute with more blue sky.

So, this showed very clearly that bees will use the UV concentric circles in the sky that surround the sun for navigation when there is enough blue sky to "get a bearing".  But in overcast conditions, the bees use landmarks, and were completely fooled when the hive was reversed north-south, but placed in a landscape "identical" to the prior landscape, but also reversed north/south.

This also seems to prove that bees have no "magnetic compass" like the one birds are said to have.  A magnetic compass would have kept them foraging to the "correct" feeder in overcast conditions when the hive was pointed north rather than south.

When you can fool the bees, and make them do the exact opposite of what they otherwise do, and then show how they correct their behavior with the return of blue sky, you have very very solid evidence.

This is not to say that odor does not help the bees find the patch of flowers once they arrive in the area indicated by the dancing.  The directional headings given by the dances are inherently "sloppy", and this is a good thing, as it spreads the foragers out a bit in what should naturally be a large patch of blooms, be they trees or ground plants.   But if odor was the navigational scheme, no be would ever fly downwind from the hive, as all the odors would come from upwind.

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