> Very, very briefly, when the foragers fly to food & 
> back through a very long, narrow tunnel, with a 
> complex background pattern, they indicate in their 
> dances a far greater distance than actually flown. 

This is an accurate statement.

It is also a first for Ruth - she freely admits that 
the dances INDICATE something.  To agree that they 
indicate distance is a major change from prior 
positions taken by Ruth, and to admit that bees
can be "fooled" to indicate in their dance a greater
distance than flown is just jaw-dropingly amazing.

Therefore, Ruth has earned as many drinks as she 
wishes to have!  What say you Ruth? 
Elaine's on 2nd Ave and 89th?  
The 212 Bar on 65th St? 
The bar at the Carlyle Hotel?  
My treat, I insist.

> It requires the bees to spend more energy per 
> unit time, to merely stay aloft, 

This is a common misconception, but is easy to correct
when one realizes that bees can hover in calm air as 
long as they like, but refuse to fly in a strong headwind.

What's happening here?  At the scale of a bee (and most
of the flying insects) air is much like water is to us.

Bees don't have to work hard to take off, they are simply
"pushing off" to become airborne.  Bees SWIM through the
air, and need very little energy to fly in still air
or hover.  But a headwind can frustrate them just as a
strong current can frustrate anyone paddling canoe.

So, flying slower would not cause bees to expend more 
energy per unit time unless the slower speed was due
to a headwind or crosswind.

But wait - that's not all - there's more!

> When they fly through such a tunnel, the
> bees are obliged to fly much more slowly 
> than normal, to avoid crashing into the 
> walls. 

> the bees indeed flew visibly much more slowly 
> inside the tunnel with the complex background 
> pattern, than [in the other tunnel] with the 
> simple pattern.

Ruth contradicted herself above, saying first that 
the slower speed was to avoid crashing into the 
walls, which would be the case regardless of the
pattern painted on the tunnel, but then claiming 
that the bees flew even more slowly in the tunnel 
with the more complex pattern.

The more simple Occam's-razor-compliant explanation
would be that the bee slowed down to allow itself
the time to PROCESS ALL THE VISUAL INFORMATION
in both the "simple" and the "complex" tunnels,
as both were certainly more visually complex than 
normal terrain would be at typical bee-flight heights.
This matches the slow (and yet slower still, for the
complex tunnel) speeds of the bees in each type of 
tunnel, so it is the more reasonable explanation, 
one that also matches the gestalt findings of the 
studies that used such tunnels.

> The bees were allowed to see the sky through an 
> insect-net that covered the top of the tunnel...

It would appear that more recent work has eliminated
the "insect net tunnel top".  Here is an illustration
snagged from the PDF file of the proof of the book
I quoted from ("The Buzz About Bees"). Note the solid
tubular tunnel, with patterns all around. 

http://www.bee-quick.com/bee-line/bee_tunnel.jpg

Hope I have cleared up a few minor points, but
let me stress that any time you can get a bee to
unwittingly LIE to its sisters, you know that you 
have come up with a very compelling test of bee 
behavior, moreso when the lie prompts action that 
would otherwise not be undertaken, such as flying 
much further than the feeding station to a point 
where there's no feeding station, no flowers, 
no nothin'.

And it goes without saying that to "mislead", the
bees must first be communicating.

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