Hi, Dave.

Re your latest message (Sept. 14) on dances without dance-attendants: I will not become embroiled in yet another endless argument over semantics with you. I know that it is impossible to prove that something does not exist. And when I state that dances without dance-attendants do not exist, what I actually mean is that at this stage we should accept  a "scientific world view" in which they do not exist. In other words, the burden of proof is on those who claim to have observed such dances.

Publish your claim in a scientific journal, and I shall begin to seriously consider it, because my logic (which you judge to be faulty) leads me to assume that no editor will publish such an extraordinary claim, unless you provide him (!) at least with the videotaped evidence.

At this stage I do not even know what the claim regarding dances without dance-attendants really stands for. What exactly do you claim to have observed?

This is not an idle question. Norman Carreck, a scientist engaged in honeybee research, also claimed to have (actually very often) observed dances without dance-attendants. But he later amended his statement (or qualified it more accurately, if you will) to state that a dance-attendant is always present at the start of the dance.

Now, in order to determine that a specific bee is a dance-attendant, the bee must be observed to follow the dancing forager (at least for a while) and repeatedly tap the forager with its antennas. So Norman's claim has now been reduced to a claim that dancing foragers are invariably attended by at least one dance-attendant that follows them (for an unspecified amount of time) after they start dancing, but when that dance-attendant eventually  leaves (at some point), the foragers are sometimes observed to continue dancing while not being followed by any dance-attendants at all. Do you claim to have observed foragers performing a dance from start to finish without any dance-attendants? Do you claim to have observed foragers dancing while being accompanied by at least one dance-attendant at the beginning of the dance (or possibly during any other part of the dance) but never throughout the whole dance?






Sincerely,

Ruth Rosin ("prickly pear")

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