Barry Donovan wrote:

>Jim [Fischer] says dance information is never accurate enough to point to a
>specific tree.  Well I don't know whether humans could expect to get
>as much accurancy out of a bee dance as a follower bee might, but
>many people have claimed that they can obain sufficient infomation
>to get pretty close to the
>indicated food source. Even if the dance information isn't all that
>accurate for a new forager, once within cooee [ ??? ] it will
>encounter a plume of the same scent as carried by the dancing bee,
>which it need only
>follow in the manner indicated by Adrian Wenner to arrive at the flowers.

*********

    Perhaps few BEE-L subscribers are bothering to follow this thread
anymore (though I hope they do) -- a simple exercise could settle the
issue in their minds.

    Barry is now in a country that approaches summertime.  He should
easily be able to train 5 (five) marked forages to collect mildly
scented sugar solution at a feeding station located 500 meters/yards
DOWNWIND from a bee colony and allow no unmarked bees to return from
that station to their colony.

    I can predict that he will obtain essentially no new recruits to
that station during a three-hour period -- "bee language" or not.
See Figure 4 in the following URL:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/abjnov1998b.htm

    Of course, he would have to work in a setting where wind direction
is fairly steady, since light winds tend to be more variable.

    By contrast, he can repeat that experiment with a station 500
meters/yards located UPWIND from the hive.  I can predict that he
will get a very different set of results (as revealed in Figure 3 of
the above URL).

    And, Jim can readily duplicate such an experiment next season when
forage becomes scarce.

    Will either Barry or Jim (or any other bee language advocate)
conduct such a simple experiment?   I can predict that they will not
do so.  I can also predict that if they do so, they will not share
their results with the rest of us.

                                                        Adrian


--
Adrian M. Wenner                (805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road                 [log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA  93103        www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm

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*
*    "We not only believe what we see:
*  to some extent we see what we believe."
*
*                           Richard Gregory (1970)
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