We know that shortly after WWII v. Frisch published his amazing "discovery"
of the of the honeybee "dance language", whereby honeybee-recruits
"instinctively" obtain and use spatial information, contained in
foragers'-dances, about the location of their foragers' food-site, to help
them find the source on their own. The "discovery" soon became a revered
ruling paradigm, which earned v. Frisch world wide fame, including numerous
prestigious prizes, and finally also the Nobel Prize, in 1973; a full 6
years after Wenner & his team had already discovered, and published in 1967,
that honeybee-recruits use only odor, and were "rewarded" by being quickly
turned into pariahs.



The free weekly online Science News e-Letter has an interesting practice. In
its Timeline it always includes items published in Science News during the
same week 70 years ago. The Timeline for Oct. 5, 2007, thus reproduces
verbatim the report on v. Frisch's honeybee-research, as published in
Science News of Oct. 2, 1937. The report is a bit fuzzy, and provides no
reference. (They apparently did not bother about such matters then.) But
examining the article by Frisch (1937). The language of bees. *Science
Progress*, 32(125): 29-37, makes it quite clear that the report could only
have been based on that article, that was in turn based on a guest lecture
v. Frisch had delivered at the University College of London, in 1937, on all
his honeybee-research.



The article by Frisch (1937) clearly shows that v. Frisch's pre-WWII studies
on honeybee-recruitment, had already led him to conclude that honeybee
recruits use only odoir; that the conclusion was fully justified; and that
his results already grossly contradicted his post-WWII "dance language".
After the "discovery" of his post WWII "dance language", he suppressed his
pre-WWII results, which discredited the "discovery". No wonder, in spite of
60 years of  almost endless attempts, by scientists all over the world, no
one has yet been able to experimentally confirm the existence of v. Frisch's
post-WWII "dance language".



Wenner & his team, did not realize that they were being punished for having
unknowingly rediscovered and published in 1967, what v. Frisch had already
discovered and published much earlier, (with a very extensive German summary
actually published in 1923), until I accidentally stumbled on a reprint of
Frisch (1937) in *The 1939 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution*,
and published the find in vol. 84 of *J. theoret. Biol*. of 1980. The
reprint was later cited in the 1990 book by Wenner & wells; Anatomy of a
Controversy: The Question of a "Language" Among bees. Another reprint of
Frisch (1937) was then published, (with an introduction by Wenner), in *Bee
World* in 1993.



The honeybee "dance language" controversy actually concerns the very
foundations of the whole field of behavioral science, i.e. the problem of
the existence of "instincts". aunch "dance language" supporters,
nonetheless, still persist in ignoring the article by Frisch (1937). It is,
therefore, pleasing to find that the "ghost of that publication has now
arisen to still haunt and taunt" them.

-- 
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")

******************************************************
* Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at:          *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm  *
******************************************************