>Here is the experiment:
>
>1.  Make up a colony of =87 purebred Italians, and =87 purebred carnolian,
>make sure the origin of the bee is obvious, either by colour, or by
>marking the bees in some way.
>
>2.  Do the standard Dance Language tests, however you should observe:
>
>3.  If a Italian scout dances, the italian foragers should arrive at the
>indicated place, while the carnolians arrive at some place farther from
>the hive.  If a carnolian scout dances, the carnolians arrive at the
>indicated place, the italians fall short.
>
>
>Anticipated possible problems:
>
>1.  The hive quickly solves its semantic problems by some correction
>measure so that all bees dance the same.
>
>2. The dance-language information and the bee=EDs resulting actions isn=EDt
>precise enough to measure any difference between the bees of different
>races.
>
>Does this seem plausible and do-able to anyone?  Comments?
>Has it already been done?
 
I could swear I heard Fred Dyer give a talk at the University of Kansas on
this issue a few years back - with mixed colonies of mellifera and cerana,
or something along those lines - and that he did in fact get bees flying
inappropriate distances when following scouts of the "wrong" type. Anyone
care to confirm or deny that this is what Fred found while he was in Asia?
Another little nagging voice tells me Tom Seeley may know about this, too.
Ah, going senile at 34... ;-)
 
Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82