To Peter Borst:

By hypothesizing about how the honeybee "dance language" (DL) might work,
you are "putting the cart before the horses", because there has never been
any convincing experimental evidence for the existence of such a DL.
Instead, there has only been devastating arguments against the DL
hypothesis, coming from many different directions.

If, in spite of all that, you still refuse to part with your beloved fantasy
of a honeybee DL, you might have long ago "reached beyond the point of no
return". But, just in case there is still some hope for you, give me any
piece of evidence that suffices to convince you that honeybee recruits use
DL information, and I will debunk it for you.

As for your conviction that v. Frisch fully deserved the 1973 Nobel Prize he
was awarded "for the discovery & deciphering of the honeybee DL", aren't you
at all disturbed by the study published more than 30 years later by Riley et
al. (2005), in the journal *Nature*, where the authors express the hope that
their experimental results would be accepted as a vindication of vv.
Frisch's DL hypothesis? If the DL hypothesis still required an experimental
validation in 2005, obviously it had not been experimentally validated in
1973! Has the it been finally experimentally validated by Riley et al.
(2005)? Not at all!

I shall deal with that study only very briefly here. The DL hypothesis was
intended to explain how recruits find their foragers' food-source on their
own. Of the 36 bees for which radar-tracks are provided by Riley et al, only
2 bees are reported to "have found and landed on" the foragers'-feeder. When
I e-mailed the authors, requesting more details, I was informed by one of
them (U. Greggers), It is, in principle, impossible to address the problem
of how recruits find their foragers food-source on their own, by studying
only bees that never found it!

The conclusion that Riley et al. (2005) did not obtain experimental evidence
that suffices to validate the DL hypothesis, need not surprise anyone. The
hypothesis was first published by v. Frisch in a scientific journal in 1946
(as presumably already experimentally confirmed), had already been "dead as
a doornail", as a result of v. Frisch's first study on honeybee-recruitment,
published in an extensive summary in 1923. He fully justifiably and
correctly concluded, then, that recruits use only odor, and *no *information
about the location of any food.

Your adulation of Tom Seeley may be somewhat misplaced. Seeley is the
honeybee-researcher who "discovered" that nest-scouts determine the size of
the area of the base of a cavity, by measuring the length of the base's
margins while crawling along the margins. This is an achievement that no one
can accomplish, because the size of an area is independ of the length of the
margins!

You are free to believe in anything you wish, but I've had it!


-- 
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")

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