Latest  on the activities of Adrian
Wenner......https://ccs.ucsb.edu/ccs-profiles/adrian-wenner-4750

Here's what I wrote about him back in 2006 at the IUSSI Congress in St.
Petersburg, Russia:

"Pavlovian learning in insects was in fact an unstated theme of the
Congress.It was keynoted by Adrian Wenner, Professor Emeritus,
University California at Santa Barbara and focused mostly on honey bees,
although the other social insects, ants, wasps and termites also got
their due.The meeting was also considered a collective attempt by social
insect scientists in the rest of Europe to communicate with their
colleagues in Russia, who are now beginning to emerge and flourish as
the Soviet Union’s political domination and persecution of many
scientists is on the wane.How powerful these influences were has been
commemorated by a sculpture in the University’s courtyard dedicated to
repression of the faculty during the Soviet era.

"In a metaphoric way, Dr. Wenner too was ending his self-imposed
isolation from bee research as part of this congress.He was clearly
surprised that so much of his work has been recognized in Russia, when
elsewhere it was at best ignored, at worst denigrated.The story of Dr.
Wenner’s journey from high school principal and teacher to Professor
Emeritus is long and complicated.He summarized some of it in his
discussion, including rearing queens while working his uncles’ apiary
that led him to suspect that sound would be better ways for bees to
communicate the existence of food sources to their sisters rather than
dancing in a dark hive.From this emerged the hypothesis that bees
communicate their own experience via a dance, but do not pass it on to
others through 'language.Thus began a three-decade struggle first within
himself as he saw one of his cherished ideas (the honey bee’s dance
language) shattered, and later with a majority of the scientific
community who were unwilling to reconsider Dr. Karl Von Frisch’s
experiments and conclusions when confronted with conflicting data.

"Dr. Wenner provided three hypotheses at the Congress based on his work:

 1. “Bees rely on a suite of odors, as well as on visual and other cues,
    but do not necessarily rely on a single chemical at any one
    time.”This is often the result of learning (conditioned
    response).Bees receiving a specific odor or suite of odors injected
    into the colony, for example, will return to empty dishes to which
    they were previously trained through use of these odors.
 2. “Recruitment of experienced bees each day can be explained by
    conditioned response, a recruitment to wherever the odor of similar
    food sources exist in the region.”Experienced forager bees, for
    example, when receiving a familiar odor, immediately go to
    previously yielding sources (learning), while recruits arrive much
    later (a learning curve is required).
 3. “Without odor, recruited bees cannot find a food source.”Switching
    to unscented food halfway through an experiment results in no
    further recruits.Odorless dishes and paraphernalia are difficult to
    make because odor is literally everywhere, and it only takes a few
    molecules to train bees.Wind also complicates foraging experiments
    as does distance from the hive of a scent.Finally, bees are easily
    distracted by a suite of odors in nature (nectar flow) stronger than
    those provided by investigators.

"The above, Dr. Wenner concluded, could be used in practical
applications that would encourage bees to forage on particular crops,
something that many have worked on for decades with little success.This
will, however, not be easy, because it must take into account the 'full
application of current knowledge about odor,' including influence of
conditioned response (learning), wind and competing scents found in
nature."http://apisenterprises.com/papers_htm/ABJ/IUSSI%20Meets%20in%20St.%20Petersburg_full.htm

There's more at beesource.com always a good place to look for beekeeping
personalities and controversy:
https://www.beesource.com/threads/the-honeybee-dance-language-dl-controversy.199418/#post-130221

--
Malcolm T. Sanford
Apis Information Resource Center <https://beekeep.info>

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