The arguments provided to us regarding the "bee dance language" hypothesis versus other explanations regarding how naive bees are recruited to a food resource (or a new home, etc.) by scout bees have been fascinating and thought provoking. Here are some of the thoughts that have been provoked in me: It was not mentioned whether there was found to be a directional component in the information passed from the scouts to the recruitees. How about a distance component? If the bees find the resource by "smell", then does that mean that they can only find resources that are "upwind" from them. Does it work like pheromones that male moths follow to find a mate where they follow the molecules through the air? What happens when the wind direction changes. Can they still find the resources? I assume that once they've found it they use visual cues to find it again. Do all scout bees just scout upwind because that's the only way they can recruit naive bees to find a resource? What if there is "no wind"? Do the recruited bees search in a large circle around the hive, or do they go in a particular direction more directly toward the resource when recruited? Please forgive me for not having read the research papers on the subject before asking all these questions. Maybe they've already been answered somewhere. I love the way the questions have been rephrased, though: how do the scout bees communicate information to naive recruits? What information do they communicate? How do the naive recruits then find the resource? I assume that all these questions have not yet been answered sufficiently to we wouldn't still be arguing about them. Best wishes for further success in beekeeping and learning additional knowledge about what they do and how they do it. Since we are not bees, the why questions are much more difficult to answer except from our own perspectives, but their reasons for doing things may be quite different from ours would be. Layne Westover College Station, Texas, U.S.A., where peach trees are starting to bloom