Recently, I watched the AAPA presentations with I am sure, many other bee researchers. One of the older ones said afterwards it was remarkable how the young researchers never cited work prior to 2000. As if that stuff is old and no longer valid. I guess the following would be considered old by those standards, dated as it is from 1999. 


> We tested the ability of free-flying honeybees to discriminate a conditioning odor from an array of 44 simultaneously presented substances. The stimuli included homologous series of aliphatic alcohols, aldehydes and ketones, isomeric forms of some of these substances, as well as several terpenes and odor mixtures, and thus comprised stimuli of varying degrees of structural similarity to any conditioning odor. 

> We found (i) that the honeybees significantly distinguished between 97.0% of the 1848 odor pairs tested, thus showing an excellent discrimination performance when tested in a free-flying situation with an array of structurally related substances; (ii) a significant negative correlation between discrimination performance and structural similarity of odorants in terms of differences in carbon chain length with all aliphatic substance classes tested; (iii) that both the position and type of a functional group also affected discriminability of odorants in a substance class-specific manner; and (iv)

> striking similarities in odor structure-activity relationships between honeybees and human and nonhuman primates tested previously on a subset of substances employed here. Our findings demonstrate that the similiarities found in the structural organization of the olfactory systems of insects and vertebrates are paralleled by striking similarities in relative discrimination abilities. This strongly suggests that similar mechanisms of odor coding and discrimination may underlie olfaction in vertebrates and insects. 

Laska, M., Galizia, C. G., Giurfa, M., & Menzel, R. (1999). Olfactory discrimination ability and odor structure–activity relationships in honeybees. Chemical senses, 24(4), 429-438.
Chicago

¶

If you are still reading, note that they say "striking similarities" -- not one is better nor worse than another. They also cite the work of von Frisch from 1919. Von Frisch himself had this to say:

> But knowing the date of individual discoveries does not matter a great deal. It is more important to consider in their entirety the accomplishments of these small insects, the bees. The more deeply one probes here the greater his sense of wonder, and this may perhaps restore to some that reverence for the creative forces of Nature which has unfortunately been lost by so many of today's people.

KARL VON FRISCH
Munich
March 17, 1971

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