Hi All

Just thought that those of you following the radar tracking debate might like to look at this paper by Riley and his colleagues (see below).

The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, one of the most prestigious biology journals in the UK.  Written before the recently debated Nature paper, it investigated the flight of bees captured at feeders, displaced, and released with transponders attached.  For anyone wondering about the behaviour of bees following such treatment, it is quite revealing.  The person releasing the bees said that the released bees initially flew in circles or landed, but the radar tracks show that they settled into predictable straight-line flights in the direction the hive would have been if they hadn’t been displaced.  Those flights ignored artificial landmarks, going over them even though their normal route home didn’t have them.  Near the end of their flights, some bees did take notice of a fairly subtle linear feature, a line at the boundary of short and higher grass, and used this to return homewards.  The returning flights, as with the flights of new recruits in the Nature study we were discussing previously, continued straight for the feeder to hive distance, then turned into more erratic searching flights.

None of this comments directly on the dance language (thank goodness, I hear you cry!) but it shows how relatively unaffected the bees are by the transponders, and how determined they are to fly on automatic pilot back to where they think the hive should be.  Some of you might also like the detail of the bees’ correction for wind speed and direction.

Bye for now

Gavin.

Sorry - I tried a 'tinyurl' link straight to the PDF, but it didn't appear to work.  So go here:

http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/

and pick 'Proceedings of the Royal Society B'

then at 'Quick search' enter 'Riley'.

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