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)

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