Steve Noble wrote:

>Maybe the study is only showing the degree to which Honey bees rely on
>dance to locate their food, not that they don�t ever use their sense of
>smell.

No one is denying that honey bees have an acutely fine sense of smell. We
all recognize the role that odors have in the lives of bees. The question
is, does the language work? Here is a perfect example of how it fails. Any
mechanism that works will have a logical breaking point and this is it. If
the language never worked, you would not see this obvious breaking point.
That is, the dance only indicates a two dimensional plane and cannot
indicate height. 

Lindauer points out that the tropical stingless bees spend a lot of time in
very tall tress, hence the marking technique works well for them.
Presumably, honey bees would also be able to locate large patches of forage
in tree tops if they were flying above the trees. However, there seems to be
no way for them to use the dance to say: "go NW one mile and then STRAIGHT
UP 65 feet" --  hence they arrive at the base of the tower and can't find
the feeder.

pb

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