A recent set of exchanges on BEE-L centered on some rather mild comments
by Barry Birkey, followed by many rather testy responses by James Fischer.
I understand why Fischer is upset, since I have been through this same
exercise many times in the past few decades.

   Fischer's responses unfortunately contained many errors of fact about
our work and position in the controversy, but members of this list need
only go to the following website for clarification:

http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm

   I thus need provide no rebuttal to many of Fisher's comments.  I thank
him, though, for this opportunity to elaborate upon a few points that he
raised in both of his responses (5/26 and 5/29).

1)  Fischer wrote:  "The 'compass direction'  is not at all 'cryptic'.  Any
child of 10 with an observation hive can watch the dances, transpose the
bee dances into a distance/direction vector, go to the location cited, and
count the visiting bees.  People have been verifying this over and over for
years."

   My response:  Yes, the dance maneuver contains information but VERY
inaccurate information.  For instance, if a bee returns from a source 1000
yards from the hive and executes the maneuver, the error (as determined
both by bee language advocates and by us) is about plus or minus about 400
yards (both in distance and direction).  That means that the forager is
"describing" an area of about a half million square yards.  And that
doesn't even include the problem of between-bee error."  I must agree with
Birkey that such information is, indeed, cryptic.

   Fischer apparently has access to an observation hive.  He should take a
wax pencil or crayon and draw a line on the glass over the thorax of a
dancing bee as it moves along.  He will find that he will not have a
"figure-8" on the glass when he is done.

2)  Fischer wrote:  "Regardless of individual opinions, recent work with
"Robo-Bee" by Thomas Seeley, of Cornell University ... tends to remove what
little doubt might have remained about the "dance vs odor" question."

   Such certainty is admirable in religion, but we in science are not
supposed to have such firm convictions.  I have not had access to details
of the Seeley experiment as briefly described but instead cover here some
simple logic.

(a)  Von Frisch clearly stated in 1937, "I succeeded with all kinds of
flowers with the exception of flowers without any scent...The dancing bee
can communicate a message about all kinds of scented flowers by means of
the scent adhering to its body."  (As Birkey mentioned --- see Item #1B on
the website.)

   That is, without scent, there is no recruitment.  Both von Frisch and we
learned that the hard way!  Sucrose solution has a vapor pressure of zero
and hence has no scent.  One must therefore be careful when conducting
experiments to make ABSOLUTELY certain that no odor exists (such as perfume
or deodorant on one of the people conducting the experiment).  According to
Fischer, "[the robo bee] dispenses a 'sample' of nectar to bees..."  How
could they (or Fischer) be sure NO odor was involved?

   We can also ask, "How long did it take the new recruits in the Seeley
experiment to find the food source?  (See below.)

(b)  Consider the history of the controversy (Item #1A on the website).  In
the 1940s people felt that von Frisch had either "discovered the language"
of bees or that he had "proved" that bees have a "language" (as I myself
believed during my doctoral research).  The publication of the results of
our double controlled and crucial experiments in the late 1960s indicated
otherwise.  We had stumbled onto the validity of von Frisch's 1937
conclusions --- without odor there is no recruitment.

   After our experimental challenge of existing dogma, a sequence of
researchers has attempted to rescue the original hypothesis.

   James Gould (initially with co-workers) temporarily rescued the
hypothesis in the minds of advocates but also found that searching bees
took too long to find the "target" food source for them to have "flown
directly out," as stated by von Frisch.  Gould later admitted that von
Frisch had not really demonstrated that bees had a "language" after all but
concluded that he himself had done so.

     Four German and Danish experimenters (expending a half million
dollars) build a "robot bee" to "prove" that the "language" existed after
all --- apparently not accepting Gould's assertion.  A close examination of
their results, though, reveals that they did not succeed (see Item #15 on
the website, now being translated for Polish beekeepers).  One of those
researchers, in a related set of experiments, found that recruits searched
an average of two hours before reaching the target dish (less than a minute
flight time away from the hive).

   Now (according to Fischer) Seeley and co-workers have apparently
repeated a robot bee experiment and have also claimed success.  Will those
claims also erode in time?

   Why have all these researchers expended so much (taxpayer) money and
energy these past few decades in repeated attempts to "prove" that bees
have a "language"?  After all, they presumably believed that von Frisch had
done so in the 1940s.  The answer:  Bee language advocates apparently now
have little confidence in their convictions.

3)  Fischer wrote:  "If odor had anything to do with recruitment, then
Robo-Bee would be unable to recruit any bees at all...."

   That's exactly what should have happened (no recruitment with no odor),
just as von Frisch insisted upon in 1937 (see above) and as we found in
many experiments designed to exclude odor.

4)  Fischer wrote "I have no doubt that odor, colors, and other "landing
zone cues" are used by bees AFTER they arrive at the general location
designated by a bee dance.

   Here is another interesting exercise Fischer can do.  He can set up a
hive and have a few marked foragers visit a feeding station located a few
hundred yards away (to make sure he is not dealing with round dances).  He
can then watch recruited bees come into the station from downwind with the
aid of binoculars.  (We have never been able to get bee language advocates
to do that simple exercise.)

5)  Fischer wrote:   "If an experienced forager knows of a good source of
pollen/nectar that is within 20 SECONDS flight time, which dance does she
do?  She does the 'round dance'."

   Quite wrong!  An empty bee flies 7.5 yards per second and can cover 150
yards in 20 seconds, well beyond the range of "round dances."  Fischer's
implication that I don't know the difference between round and waggle
dances doesn't ring true.  After all, I was the first person to tape record
and analyze the sounds of dancing bees.  (See Item # 4 on the website.)

6)  Fischer wrote:  "For there to be a "controversy", there must be more
than one scientist to disagree.  The only person who seems to be promoting
"odor" over dance is Dr. Wenner."

   We have found that argument to be a common ploy by bee language
advocates (try to isolate the dissident).  Fischer claimed that he had read
all the material on the website, but he seems to have missed the fourth
from the last item, UNSOLICITED COMMENTS.  Besides those little clips, I
constantly receive letters from all over the world endorsing our position.
I belong to several beekeeping and research organizations (e.g., ABF, WAS,
AAPA, CA State Beekeepers Assoc.)  When I go to meetings of those groups, I
am warmly received.  I am also invited to participate in various symposia
and write invited reviews about the subject.  Even in the last few days I
have received several notes of support.

   Fischer's comments and attitude remind me of an episode.  Some years
back, a graduate student from Cornell visited our campus and thought it
appropriate to visit me, even though he knew we were in opposite camps on
the "language" topic.  After about 15 minutes of tense participation on his
part, he blurted out, "Why you aren't such a bad person, after all!"  We
then had a friendly visit.

   Such is the way with bias and indoctrination.  I am sure that if Fischer
sat down with me over a beer, he would find I was not the oddball he has
portrayed me to be.

7)  Fischer wrote:  "How many researchers and/or beekeepers would agree
that any "big red flag" is anywhere in sight?  Show of hands, ladies and
gentlemen?  People with observation hives get TWO votes.  People with
entomology degrees get THREE votes, but only if they kept an observation
hive alive through winter."

   Wow!  Just think how fast science would progress if issues such as these
were settled by vote!  That notion fails to take into account the power of
indoctrination.

   If scientists had voted in Galileo's day, for instance, we might still
believe that the Sun goes around the Earth (those interested in the subject
should read the recent book, GALILEO'S DAUGHTER).

   If the scientific and medical communities had voted in Pasteur's day, we
might not have pasteurized milk today.

*******

   All of this exchange has reminded me of a statement by Nobel Prize
winner Peter Medawar in his 1979 book, ADVICE TO A YOUNG SCIENTIST:  "I
cannot give any scientist of any age better advice that this: the intensity
of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is
true or not."

   And all that my co-workers and I have been doing is attempting to
illustrate how our experimental results agreed with a 1937 finding made by
another Nobel Prize winner, Karl von Frisch:  "I succeeded with all kinds
of flowers with the exception of flowers without any scent." and "The bees
communicated with fly out and look for the flowers with this specific
scent.  Flying out in all directions, they find out in the shortest time
the plant which has commenced to bloom, wherever it is in the entire flying
district." (See Item #1B on the website.)  The time it take a searching bee
to find a target food source certainly agrees with von Frisch's
conclusions.

   If our taking such a stand is criminal, then my co-workers and I are guilty!

   May I repeat a point I have made before on this list.  We have had the
bee language hypothesis for half a century, but beekeepers have yet to
receive benefit from that hypothesis --- despite the expenditure of
millions of dollars of taxpayer money in attempts to prove its validity.
What would such an expenditure of money accomplished had it been used for
studies of the importance of wind direction on colony foraging patterns and
pollination of crops?   (See Items #24, 25, and 26 on the website.)

                                                                Adrian

Adrian M. Wenner                    (805) 963-8508 (home phone)
967 Garcia Road                     (805) 893-8062  (UCSB FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA  93106  [http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm]

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*
*    "The history of science teaches us that each time we think
*  that we have it all figured out, nature has a radical surprise
*  in store for us that requires significant and sometimes drastic
*  changes in how we think the world works."
*
*                                          Brian Greene (1999:373)
*
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