Hi Murray > What does any of this show? Nothing more than making absolute statements > that bees will behave to some human concept of an efficiency model is > nonsense. They behave to their own agenda. Foraging preferences should not be considered as a 'colony feature' and even though dance information will be picked up by several of the patrilines in a colony, each patriline ccould have a different response to the situation. I have not seen such striking examples as Murray, because I have rarely been dealing with such high colony numbers, but I have seen plenty of foraging situations that did not make sense (to me at least) I have seen a group of more than fifty colonies ignore a field of rape that they were sitting in the lower margin of, and fly to a field of rape of identical seed type on a remote part of the same farm, the soil type could have been different, however the crops were sown within hours of each other and obviously enjoyed the same weather. I could not tell any difference between the fields myself. Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable) -- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and other info ---