Peter, I fully agree - it makes for popular reading, but it's a slippery slope.  
 
>The problem is, the more people regard honey bees as "like us" -- the less they really understand them. They are not like us.<I really like your comment - may I quote you?Our Journeyman class recently got into a discussion of bees' color vision and the popular myth that since bees can't see red, then red bee suits must make a beekeeper invisible to a bee.  In this case, an anthropomorphic example may have been the best answer - a color blind person may not be able to distinguish a red object from a green one, yet they still see the object.  My own father couldn't tell red from green from yellow on traffic lights - he could still see the lights.  He also stopped the city of Billings from installing new stop lights that were being installed upside down, and  he hated single, flashing traffic lights hanging over rural intersections - were they yellow (warning), red (stop)?  He and his brother were terrible at finding and picking ripe cherries - they had problems seeing fruit from leaves unless the sun was behind the fruit.I have students who have commented that it's too bad bees have poor vision.  My response to the students, bees and their compound eyes have a wrap-around field of view, discern UV patterns on flowers, and are very good at 'seeing' markers flash by - apparently navigating by vectoring; if a bee could talk, it might express a similar opinion about the deficiencies of human vision.  For those who think that because the bee compound eye of the bee has multiple ocelli, that the bee must see the world as a blurry mosaic of images - I ask, what would an alien think about human vision if they had no knowledge of rods and cones?   What's to say that the bee's brain doesn't assemble the ocelli inputs  into one seamless, panoramic image?As Peter said - they are not like us.As Peter stated: They're not like us.

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