Can an Insect Speak? 
The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language
by Eileen Crist

excerpts

In the mid-1960s behavioral scientists Adrian Wenner, Patrick Wells, and
their associates attacked what they recast as the 'dance language
hypothesis'. They contested that honeybees navigate on the basis of
information encoded in the dances they attend, claiming instead that it was
scientists who deciphered the dance and used the information to find the
locations. 

For Wenner, the fact that the dance contains information did not mean the
attending bees use that information. Rather, he maintained that 'successful
recruited bees had acted as if they had used the distance and direction
information we scientists had chosen to measure'. 

In their 1990 work, Wenner and Wells posed a pointed question: In brief, the
question at issue here is: 'Can one really believe that the small honey bee
visiting a flower has language capability?' The same social situation that
permitted the rise of 'New Age' thinking in the public at large had
apparently spilled over into the biological community.  

The implied response is that one cannot really believe such a far-fetched
proposition as an insect with language. The authors do not consider that
their own adamant rejection of a 'small' honeybee with language capability
has deepseated historical origins, cultural roots, and ideological overtones.  

In a conservation biology context, Stephen Kellert and E. O. Wilson have
argued that dismissive and/or derogatory ideas about invertebrates reveal
more about the human attitudes and perceptions than about the organisms
themselves. Negative perceptions do a profound disservice to the vital
ecological roles of invertebrates. 

FROM:
Can an Insect Speak? 
The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language
by Eileen Crist

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