>My question is; do bees have antlike intelligence and
>will learn to stay away from these plants or will they keep falling victim
>like a dumb fly.
 
I can't answer this one directly, bu I can recommend a really wonderful
book on bee intelligence. It's called "The Honey Bee" and is by James L.
Gould and Carol Grant Gould. I bought it as a Scientific American Library
Paperback. The title page says the Scientific American Library is a
division of HPHLP, New York. ISBN# is ISBN 0-7167-5023-6 (hardaback) and
ISBN 0-7167-6010-X (Paperback). Distributor is W.H. Freeman & Comapny, New
York and Oxford.
 
The authors have apparently spent much time doing and reading research that
begins with Von Frisch's discovery of the dance language and moves from
there to an amazing investiagtion of all aspects of honey bee
communication, intelligence, and learning. There are chapters on the dance
langaguage (and the controversy surrounding it), on bee navigation,  on how
bees recognize flowers (color, shape, smell) and on how bee physiology
manages to support such seemingly complex mental processes. Some parts are
technical enough to require close reading by a non-scientist, but these are
the exception rather than the rule. One strong point of the book is the
regular description of the experiments used to come to particular
conclusions about how bees perceive the world and communicate their
perceptions to other bees. Having a window onto *how* the conclusions were
reached gives the reader much greater confidence in the authors than would
a simple assertion.  On the whole, the book is very well written for a lay
audience that doesn't mind stretching their neurons a bit.
 
I'm not related to the authors or their publishing company, and I don't own
a bookstore -- I just think this is a great book for any beekeeper who
wants to know more about how bees work.
 
--------
On the carnivorous plant front, I can't imagine, unless you have a whole
field full, that the plants could eat enough bees to adversely affect a
colony of tens of thousands of bees.
 
 
Greg
 
 
____________________________________________________
Greg Hankins                       Mt. Gilead, NC
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