The arguments provided to us regarding the "bee dance language" hypothesis
versus other explanations regarding how naive bees are recruited to a food
resource (or a new home, etc.) by scout bees have been fascinating and thought
provoking.

Here are some of the thoughts that have been provoked in me:
It was not mentioned whether there was found to be a directional component in
the information passed from the scouts to the recruitees.  How about a distance
component?

If the bees find the resource by "smell", then does that mean that they can
only find resources that are "upwind" from them.  Does it work like pheromones
that male moths follow to find a mate where they follow the molecules through
the air?  What happens when the wind direction changes.  Can they still find
the resources?  I assume that once they've found it they use visual cues to
find it again.  Do all scout bees just scout upwind because that's the only way
they can recruit naive bees to find a resource?  What if there is "no wind"?
Do the recruited bees search in a large circle around the hive, or do they go
in a particular direction more directly toward the resource when recruited?

Please forgive me for not having read the research papers on the subject before
asking all these questions.  Maybe they've already been answered somewhere.
I love the way the questions have been rephrased, though:  how do the scout
bees communicate information to naive recruits?  What information do they
communicate?  How do the naive recruits then find the resource?  I assume that
all these questions have not yet been answered sufficiently to we wouldn't
still be arguing about them.  Best wishes for further success in beekeeping and
learning additional knowledge about what they do and how they do it.  Since we
are not bees, the why questions are much more difficult to answer except from
our own perspectives, but their reasons for doing things may be quite different
from ours would be.

Layne Westover
College Station, Texas, U.S.A., where peach trees are starting to bloom