Thanks to Mr Fischer for his comments. Here is my original paper
at Internet naturalSCIENCE that may flesh out my thinking:

http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-13/ns_jdo.html

Here is what I think happened in an evolutionary sense:

1) Bees originally foraged independently.

2) When a bee found a good food source, she performed a dance
to aid in memorising the location of the resource, so that she
could fly directly to the spot and avoid having to use odour
alone to relocate the resource. I think this behaviour evolved
as a kind of "idiothetic" behaviour. There are precedents for
similar movements (see my paper above).

3) Over time, other bees evolved an attraction to the dancing
bee, and were able to obtain information about a resource
and the associated odour by attending on the dancing bee.

4) The dances became longer and the amount of attention they
received increased, as it became an advantage to forage
communally and to share odour information. Odour became the
basis for communicating the whereabouts of resources.

5) Humans came along and noticed that the honeybee dance
contained what looked like symbolic information and
assumed that it was communicated from one bee to another.
This was a case of jumping to conclusions.


The problem with the new Esch et al. theory is that if it
is true that optic flow is the basis for distance estimation,
this demands great accuracy as regards direction. Esch et
al. note this themselves. However, this accuracy is not
available, as the following paper relates:

Vadas, R.L. 1994.  The anatomy of an ecological controversy:
honey-bee searching behaviour.  Oikos 69: 158-166 and at:
http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/oikos94.htm


Julian O'Dea