>>when an uncommitted scout is recruited to a site, she does not blindly support the bee whose dance she followed.  Instead, she examines the advertised site herself, and only if she too judges it to be a worthy site does she perform a dance for it and thereby
recruit still more bees to the site.

What puzzles me is if and how the different scouts' excitement about their nest locations candidates is kept true to some relative scale.

Say, the scout for location A exhibits level 5 excitement (on a scale from 0 to 6) and all the others manifest level 4 excitement or lower.

If I am a bee in the swarm trying to establish my own independent opinion, I am inclined to follow the location A scout BUT how do I know scout A is not 'grandstanding' unless I go and visit every single site myself?  I'd want to know that my comparison is apples to apples.  It would be inefficient for every bee to visit every site after all.

I also wonder if the primary scouts are recruited in equal numbers or proportional numbers from the different patrilines.  Italian race father offspring scouts may use slightly different site selection criteria than, say, Caucasian race father offspring from the same mother queen.  How - if they do - resolve their parameter or scale differences?  I'd think this is done along the lines of forage source preference selection.

Waldemar 

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