Peter Borst wrote: 

//“He set a feeding station on a tower about 65 feet up.”

Peter, interesting study.  I wonder how often honey bees would have to find 
a source 65 feet up on a tower?  65 feet up in the air is a long way up.  
What about 35 feet up?  15 Feet?

//“The dance language only contains horizontal (2 dimensional)
information and so completely fails when the food source is not on or
near the ground.”

Again, couldn’t it be a matter of degree?  It just seems to me that the two 
mechanisms are likely to be working in different combinations of varying 
degrees in different species.  It’s hard for me to accept after seeing how 
quickly my bees descend on a dripping frame of honey left out on a warm 
day, that they are not smelling the stuff to some degree.  If the sense of 
smell is so strong in one species of bee is it not rather unlikely that it 
would be absent in another, especially when the two species are after the 
same food?  For this reason I am skeptical of what this study seems to 
imply; that honey bees lack a sense of smell.  But maybe that’s not it.  
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.

Steve Noble   

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