Please, excuse the inavoidable length of this message!



To James Fischer, and all, Hi.



I respond here as briefly as I can to comments in two pro DL messages (of Sept. 7 & 9) from Fischer, not necessarily in the order in which his comments were made. To Fischer: I already alerted you to some notes (in my earlier post, of Sept. 8) that are relevant to several of your comments. I do not want to go into further details regarding the gagging of DL, beyond noting that I fully trust that someone as competent to represent the opposition to the DL hypothesis as Dr. Wenner, who launched this opposition some 35 years ago, does not need a year and a half to revise anything he submits for publication on this issue. I.e., I strongly suspect that the delay came from the opposite side. Other than that:



Websites associated with Bee-L are devoted first and foremost to beekeeping, and cannot qualify as sites devoted to the behavioral science. I referred to the Nobel Committee as having “endorsed the DL” only for the sake of brevity; based on the assumption that everyone knows exactly to what I refer. By the same token, I use the term DL for the sake of brevity; again assuming that everyone knows exactly to what I refer. I would not sacrifice scientific rigor to brevity in a scientific forum. (For instance, those who really know are of course well aware that v. Frisch already viewed foragers’ dances as a “dance language” even when he justifiably concluded, in 1923, that honeybee recruits use odor alone and no information about the location of any food, and when he did not even know of any distance & direction information contained in the dances.)



The motives you attribute to DL opponents exist only in your own mind, and are untenable in view of the “rewards” DL opponents have gleaned, i.e. being treated by the scientific community for very many years as outcasts. I became very actively involved in supporting DL opponents, because I concluded that they were right, and because the opposition to the DL hypothesis provides support for Schneirla’s School in Behavior vs. European Ethology (which not by accident shared a Nobel Prize together with the DL). I cannot even begin to go into this issue in the present, non-scientific forum, beyond stating that I support Schneirla’s School, and consider the Nobel Winning European Ethology a misguided and misleading general approach to the whole field of behavioral science (including the study of human behavior). My motives would naturally be unimaginable to a staunch DL supporter like you. I have by now seen the letter (though not the full article) you mentioned, by a team that includes
 Menzel and Sriniuvasan, among others. Both these scientists are staunch DL supporters, which means that they are disciples of European Ethology, and I cannot quite seriously consider conclusions about behavior that are drawn by disciples of that school.



Your claim that science is based on evidence vs. beliefs is self-contradictory. Evidence is none other than the interpretations that scientists provide for observational and experimental data that cannot speak for themselves. The interpretations are however inevitably based on the paradigms specific scientists adopt, and those paradigms are a matter of belief. Even ruling paradigms in science are never accepted more than tentatively, because they may be toppled one day. Again, I cannot go any further into this complex issue in a non-scientific forum.



When I stated that you are “still a DL supporter”, I meant, in the face of a very large body of very strong evidence against the DL hypothesis. Such evidence does support the ”odor alone” hypothesis, because there are no other alternatives. I should however have added that at least some of that evidence provides direct support for “odor alone”. The “odor alone” hypothesis is superior because of its simplicity from an evolutionary point of view, in terms of easily fitting within all we know about how insects in general and flying insects in particular find food in the field. It is also superior from the point of view of Schneirla’s School, in terms of the psychic level required. This is so however only provided you seriously consider what I assume regarding the behavior of recruits in the field. (I believe that when recruits sense no attractive odors they fly at random, which means that they also change directions at random, but they do not resist the wind. Unless they sense
 attractive odors as soon as they exit the hive, this results in a passive downwind transport, which explains how they can even find downwind sources. When they sense attractive odors they respond, through directional olfactory sense organs, by advancing towards the direction from which they sense the maximal odor-stimuli. Again, I cannot even begin to go into more details on this issue in a non-scientific forum. Incidentally, contrary to your belief, DL opponents never claimed that recruits follow an odor-plume all the way from the hive to the source, except when odors from the source are carried all the way to the hive, or when there is a continually replenished odor-trail from a thick stream of foragers already flying to the source and back. Also, if bees are often observed flying downwind, they are most probably simply experienced foragers, flying to their familiar foraging area, irrespective of wind-direction at that particular time.)



The “odor alone” hypothesis requires the dance, because, contrary to v. Frisch’s belief, the odors a successful forager carries do not serve as a word in a human language, to inform recruits of the type of odors they should seek in the field. Instead, recruits must become conditioned to these odors through a gradual, progressive conditioning process, and the “reward” for that conditioning is the nutritious food the dancing forager provides to dance-attendants, or the mere sensing of attractive odors at a very close range, when the dancer provides no nutritious food.



Incidentally, I am truly relieved to find that the reference ODea cited to the effect that recruitment by dancing foragers does not exist in Africanized honeybees appears to be in error. Of course, I never doubted that it had to be in error. The low dancing frequency observed in AHB need not be a rule, because dancing frequency is affected by very many different factors.



Sorry, but much as I tried I could not even begin to respond to your posts in a shorter message. I hope to avoid further dealings with the DL in the present forum, (but I still owe ODea a more detailed response).













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