Alan wrote,
>The 2 sides seem firmly arrayed along the
> lines of "odour theory" and "language
> theory".

Hi alan,
I am not entirely sure how these "camps", became camps.

>I would have thought that both would have
> been possible in a complementary way.
>The language theory to get the bees to
>roughly the right area and the
>odour theory to allow the bees to home in
>on the specific food source.

This is precicely the relationship of bee dance and odor. Von Frisch documented over many years the level of acuity of bee senses and the ability of the bee to communicate the location of desireable forage. He also documented the mechanism of reinforcement of better forage and the bee's ability to distinguish between differing yet co-located sources.

He has written tremendous deal of very interesting material, which i suggest to anyone who keeps bees and wishes to actually learn about them.

In sum, bee finds forage. Bee works forage and returns to hive. Bee performs waggle dance. Bees pay close attention to dance, and to bee's odor on hairs and pollen. Bees go to investigate, and return reinforcing forage with more bees doing same dance to same spot(s). Even more bees investigate, and process continues and reinforces largest forage with the most distinguishing features  (color, smell, sweetness of nectar, size of forage).

There is a lot of knowledge documented in his research, from spectral analysis of bee's visible spectrum, how odor reinforces differentvforage choices, how bees can recognize and plan for a moving source of forage, how as individuals the bees choose floral sources, how bees interpret and communicate obstacles (ex. mountains), relationship of the sun to bee language and habits, bee's ability to know location of sun even at night when below horizon, effects of gravity and how thing change when these things change, etc etc.

Don't avoid his work. Its a must read.

>Mother Nature has provided the bees with
>an efficient way of locating their food
>source, the exact method is of rather
>secondary importance, but of course of
>great interest.

I don't agree. To bee a true beemaster, to be able to understand real seasonal management, and to learn how to keep you bees successfully despite all the pitfalls and failures that abound, you MUST LEARN INTIMATELY everything you can about the bee's ecology, your floral locale, and seasons and weather history and prediction.

Scot Mc Pherson
McPherson Family HoneybFarms
http://linuxfromscratch.org/~scot/
http://beewiki.linuxfromscratch.org
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/OrganicBeekeepers/

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