Hi,



In a very recent message Dr. Julian Odea recommended that I read a specific publication of his, in which he proposed to explain how the honeybee “dance language” evolved. I read that publication (available on the Internet) long ago. From my point of view however trying to explain how this presumed “dance language” evolved is highly premature, because there has never been any convincing evidence for its very existence.



Incidentally, ODea’s publication includes a reference to an article that claims that recruitment by dancing foragers does not exist in the Africanized honeybees. This, in spite of the fact that Africanized bees belong to the species Apis mellifera, and recruitment by dancing foragers is well known to exist in all other strains of this species, as well as all other species of this genus. Evolutionary considerations alone should lead one to adopt a very healthy measure of skepticism towards any claim that Africanized honeybees constitute a flagrant exception among all bees of the same species and genus. (If you see no dancing foragers, this may simply mean that all field bees are already busy foraging.)



Evolutionary considerations alone should also lead one to adopt a very healthy measure of skepticism towards any claim that honeybees constitute a flagrant exception among all living organisms, as the only animals capable of using a language of symbols at a qualitative level of complexity not know anywhere else except among humans. On top of that there is of course also a very large body of very strong evidence against the “dance language” hypothesis. I shall not however cite any of this evidence here, because I do not intend to reopen the “dance language” controversy in this forum. I dealt with this issue during June and the beginning of July of this year on the website of the [log in to unmask] And anyone interested might want to try the archives of that website.







Sincerely,

Ruth Rosin ("prickly pear")

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