>ABJ author: I remember reading, although I can’t give proper attribution, that one of the triggers for swarm cell production is the queen’s pheromone is too faint.I can see both sides to this argument (Peter vs Bill).  However, if ABJ is trying to raise the bar - I don't know of any peer-reveiwed journal that would let the statement 'I can't give proper attribution' to slide.  If one can't remember or find a reference, then it's speculation, 2nd hand information, hearsay at best and it doesn't belong in a 'scientific' article.  On the other hand, at least the author was honest.   That's acknowledgement is better than the often abused claim of ' field realistic field dose levels' that many authors have used since 2006 about trials with neonicotinoid pesticides.  In fact their numbers are usually based on either data outliers or self-proclaimed determinations.  My favorite unsupported, assertive statement about bees is the often repeated, two-part, comment that more or less says:  Bees don't have a very good sense of smell, not much better than humans; expect for some pheromones and floral scents.  There are lots of papers and books repeat this over and over, including those by well known, experienced, bee scientists.  One might expect bee scientists looking at pheromones would know better than to continue to distribute these claims, but several that I've met truly believe this to be true.Unfortunately, this combination of statements is entirely wrong.  The basis of the supposed quoted information is: 1) a very old, very small paper by Karl Van Frisch and his wife (they were the 'humans' in the trial) , and their dose/scent recognition trial was flawed by the method used to present scents the bees.  The second part of this false statement is a much later and better paper by Ribbands.  He showed that Karl was an artifact due to the a flaw in the methods of the scent reception trials conducted by Karl and his wife.  C.R. Ribbands used a better test method, using the same chemicals as Karl, and got very different results.  He then went on to show just how good bees are at detecting a much wider variety of scents at even lower concentrations.  Ribbands in essence disproved Karl's paper.  But, people seldom dig out and read old, original papers.  So Ribbands paper, taken out of context, was incorrectly interpreted as verifying Karl's statement about poor sense of smell (olfactory sensitivity).We wrote up a complete description of this, with citations in our 2015 Biosensors paper:  http://www.mdpi.com/2079-6374/5/4/678   I have great sympathy for Dr. Ribbands.  He had some insightful discoveries, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  As such, he lived to see much of his work ignored.  I highly recommend reading his books - I think IBRA has re-published some of them.  Based on our own research  over the past 20 years - C.R. Ribbands was ahead of his time.

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