Barry <[log in to unmask]> said:

> The question is, what does the bee want to bring attention to.
> Some sort of cryptic compass direction to the source or attention
> to the odor of the source?

The "compass direction"  is not at all "cryptic".  Any child of 10 with an
observation hive can watch the dances, transpose the bee dances into
a distance/direction vector, go to the location cited, and count the
visiting bees.  People have been verifying this over and over for years.

Regardless of individual opinions, recent work with "Robo-Bee" by
Thomas Seeley, of Cornell University (and, I am sure, others who's
names I do not know) tends to remove what little doubt might have
remained about the "dance vs odor" question.

Robo-Bee is a mechanical contraption that dances in the von Frisch
style.  It dispenses a "sample" of nectar to bees it is trying to recruit,
much as a bee does, but it has NO ODOR, as it:

a)  Is made of brass

b)  Has never been to the site it is "promoting"

c)  Can be used to "promote" sites where there is
     no natural forage, and only a dish of sugar-water
     not in place long enough to create a "plume"
     of odor.

d)  Can be used to promote "decoy" sites, where there
     is nothing that creates any odor of any sort, nothing
     of value to a bee except a landing pad.

If odor had anything to do with recruitment, then Robo-Bee would be
unable to recruit any bees at all.  Since Robo-Bee can recruit bees
to hitherto unknown locations, it follows that "dance" and a sample
of nectar is the minimum information required to recruit other foragers.

> Or maybe a little of one and a lot of the other.

I have no doubt that odor, colors, and other "landing zone cues"
are used by bees AFTER they arrive at the general location
designated by a bee dance.

> It's interesting to note that tests done by Dr. Wenner and assoc.
> "show that recruits do indeed take too long to find the flower source
> for a direct flight." See Figure 2.

Now hold on just a second here...  Let's walk through this "interesting"
data together.  Here is the specific quote from Dr. Wenner's paper:

        "...outgoing flight times between the colony
             and the food patch for experienced foragers was under 20
             seconds, yet recruited bees searched a median time of 8
             minutes (and as long as 75 minutes) before they found the
             station indicated by the dance."

a)  If an experienced forager knows of a good source of pollen/nectar
     that is within 20 SECONDS flight time, which dance does she
     do?  She does the "round dance".

b)  The round dance DOES NOT include a distance or direction
     vector, but simply means "close to the hive, real close".

c)  It should be no surprise that recruited bees might have
     made several landings along the way to the "prime flowers"
     claimed to be the "target".  When the recruitment was done
     by round dance.

d)  The round dance does not describe ANY specific target area.

All Dr. Werner seems to be saying here is that "the round dance
is not too accurate".  No big surprise there for anyone.

The way that the statements are made seems to be an attempt
to discredit bee dance in general (a consistent theme of Dr. Werner's),
simply because the round dance does not include vectors.  To me,
this set of data, presented without clearly defining the results of
"round vs. waggle" dances seems misleading in the extreme.
Deliberately so.

The problem is that the less well-read might tend to discount all
bee dance, including the dances that include distance and direction
vectors due to the Werner paper not making any mention of "round"
versus "waggle" dances.   (However, his own description reveals that
he must be speaking of the "round dance" for the data presented.)

No one has ever claimed that the round dance was as accurate as GPS
satellite navigation, Loran, Tacan, or a laser range-finder.  :)

How come a part-timer/side-liner like me has to point this sort of basic stuff out?


                   jim

        Farmageddon