Ted Hancock wrote:
...This isn't sound biology. In fact I can see both men going off thinking
the other was the reason the swarm landed. Bees don,t have ears so unless
they can feel vibrations through the air they should be indifferent to
noise. I am not going to rule that possibility out though. An article titled
Quantum Honeybees by Adam Frank in the Nov. 1997 issue of  Discover magazine
says that mathematician Barbara Shipman's work suggests bees -"....are
somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that
quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight,
sound and smell." ( This article says bees may be using six dimensional math
to perform their communication dances. I'm hoping some Ph.D. type can read
that article and explain it to me in one syllable words)...

am no ph.d.-type (still working on my b.s. going on 30 years now) but
believe can understand conceptually what's being discussed here...[btw,
thanks for digging up that reference on shipman's work, available online at
http://www.discover.com/ask/ (search archive), her work is certainly on the
cutting edge of integrating the knowledge/data bases of bee science (or b.s.
as
a.nachbaur used to say, for a rad read see the nachbaur papers online at
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/beekeeping/ )]
so here goes my interpretation, albeit in polysyllabic mode:

swarm observations such as those mentioned may well be examples of the
heisenberg uncertainty principle, where the observer is inherently
disturbing the phenomenon being observed and may be eliciting
pattern-recognition where only randomness might be  occuring, thus
perceiving some sort of order out of chaos...
however, this also applies to the counterintuitive field of quantum
mechanics, to quote from frank's article:
"A quantum field is a sort of framework within which particles play out
their existences...[it is postulated that] the bee perceives these fields
through quantum mechanical interactions between the fields and the atoms in
the membranes of certain cells....Shipman’s work concerned a set of
geometric problems associated with an esoteric mathematical concept known as
a flag manifold. In the jargon of mathematics, manifold  means “space.”
...When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional
outline of a three- dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a
two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up
with a hexagon. The bee’s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons,
but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more
explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that,
when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded
her of the bee’s recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold,
the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment
dance..."

not to get involved in the debate over whether bee dances are communication
and/or "idiothetic behaviour", shipman's insights
appear to explain one particularly problematic observation, the change from
round to waggle dances:
"Delving more deeply into the flag manifold, Shipman dredged up a variable,
which she called alpha, that allowed her to reproduce the entire bee dance
in all its parts and variations...
“When alpha reaches a critical value,” explains Shipman, “the projected
curves become straight line segments lying along opposing faces of the
hexagon.” The smooth divergence of the splayed lines and their abrupt
transition to discontinuous
segments are critical--they link Shipman’s curves to those parts of the
recruitment dance that bees emphasize with their waggling and buzzing.
“Biologists know that only certain parts of the dance convey information,”
she says. “In the waggle dance, it’s the diverging waggling runs and not the
return loops. In the circle dance it’s short straight segments on the sides
of the loops.” Shipman’s mathematics captures both of these characteristics,
and the parameter alpha is the key. “If different species have different
sensitivities to alpha, then they will change from the waggle dances to
round dances when the food source is at different distances.”

this would certainly appear to be a testable hypothesis, even in
the case of apis subspecies, regardless of theoretical bent...