Adrian Wenner writes,
" If bees really had a language and that notion had  helped beekeepers
this past five decades,"
the implication being that presence and use of a language by honeybees,
would clearly be of use to beekeepers. I would like to be directed to
any literature which has examined this applied aspect of the language
controversy.
As a psychologist and a beekeeper, I have always been very intrigued by
the experimental evidence both for and against bee language. I have
always been convinced that Gould's paper in Science vol 189 pp685 in
1975 in which he describes a very elegant "lie" experiment with his
ocelli masked dancers communicating an incorrect location to unmasked
followers, as a rather impressive support for the language idea. But
this is a digression, my real point is why should beekeepers be
interested in the language unless it can be demonstrated to them that it
has practical value. For example,
 
Have there been any attempts with observation hives to demonstrate
individual differences between hives in both the frequency of dances and
the resultant increase in colony weight?
 
Has anyone attempted to selectively breed from colonies which do show
vigourous dances?
 
Here in Scotland we have a foraging situation where certainly the dance
language would be very beneficial. It is foraging from the heather
moors. Here in August bees are placed often at the centre of many
hundreds of acres of heather. The heather will yield nectar on a patchy
basis. There are often no landmarks (no trees, no buildings, no rivers)
and the olfactory cues simply swamp out any directional component
because they are so omnipresent. The colony which can therefore locate
and recruit to the yield patches will obviously store more nectar, and
the dance language may be the means by which this is achieved.
 
peter Wright