Adrian Wenner writes, " If bees really had a language and that notion had helped beekeepers this past five decades," the implication being that presence and use of a language by honeybees, would clearly be of use to beekeepers. I would like to be directed to any literature which has examined this applied aspect of the language controversy. As a psychologist and a beekeeper, I have always been very intrigued by the experimental evidence both for and against bee language. I have always been convinced that Gould's paper in Science vol 189 pp685 in 1975 in which he describes a very elegant "lie" experiment with his ocelli masked dancers communicating an incorrect location to unmasked followers, as a rather impressive support for the language idea. But this is a digression, my real point is why should beekeepers be interested in the language unless it can be demonstrated to them that it has practical value. For example, Have there been any attempts with observation hives to demonstrate individual differences between hives in both the frequency of dances and the resultant increase in colony weight? Has anyone attempted to selectively breed from colonies which do show vigourous dances? Here in Scotland we have a foraging situation where certainly the dance language would be very beneficial. It is foraging from the heather moors. Here in August bees are placed often at the centre of many hundreds of acres of heather. The heather will yield nectar on a patchy basis. There are often no landmarks (no trees, no buildings, no rivers) and the olfactory cues simply swamp out any directional component because they are so omnipresent. The colony which can therefore locate and recruit to the yield patches will obviously store more nectar, and the dance language may be the means by which this is achieved. peter Wright