To Jerry,

Wow! Fascinating information! I still need to check some sites you
recommend.

I 've heard of the lidar long ago, in a personal message from Jim Fischer.
(One bit of really valid and valuable information he gave me.) I'm delighted
with your conclusion that honeybees find attractive odor-sources in the
field by use of odor and only odor, without any need for the dance.[For a
reasonable treatment of the question what the dance is good for, see my
publication in ABJ of Feb. 2000, vol. 140(2) :98.]

Once you train honeybees to food with a specific odor (inside the hive, or
near the hive), they become conditioned to this odor, and will find other
sources with this odor (and chemically related odors, as you say), in the
field. They don't have the "brains" to understand that it was associated
with food during the training, but need not have anything to do with food in
your tests.

The problems the DL hypothesis, however caused, have to do with the
inaccuracy of the information they contain. Both distance -information and
direction-information, contained in dances of foragers foraging at one and
the same site, have normal distributions. (Only the maxima of these normal
distributions, is assumed to provide the correct value; provided the
distributions were obtained under no more than light winds.) And this means
that if recruits use that information, they should not all  come to the
vicinity of the foragers'-feeder, as you expect.

Whatever problems you believe the use of food with odors may cause, and
whatever problems the odors from a daub of paint placed on the back of
trained foragers (foraging at a foragers'-feeder with scented food), may
cause to those foragers, it can not, in any way, refute the observations
that new bees invariably arrive at the feeder through an upwind zigzag (a
response to attractive odors), from as far as observers at the feeder can
only spot new-arrivals (but never from a shorter distance, in spite of the
fact that this is to be often expected if recruits use DL information),
especially when you use no other sources with the foragers' food-odor in the
field, except the foragers'-feeder. These observations alone suffice to
discredit the whole DL hypothesis. And DL opponents have known this since
Wenner briefly raised the issue in print in 1974. Nonetheless, thanks for
your additional , very strong support of the opposition to the DL
hypothesis.

Your claim that attaching chips and antennas to honeybees interferes with
their ability to fly normally, and that even capturing them, in order to do
that, can cause serious problem, is one point of criticism, among several,
that Wenner has raised against the conclusions from the radar-tracking study
by Riley et al. (in Nature, 2005). Nonetheless, in no way can I believe that
the authors of the radar-tracking study by Riley et al. (in Nature, 2005),
simply published fabricated results they never obtained.  Nor am I inclined
to seriously consider the possibility that they published only "good"
results. They meticulously reported that one of the 23 bees fitted with
transponders and released at the hive, never left the vicinity of the hive,
and 3 other bees in that group started flying east, like all the rest, but
did not provide enough radar-"sightings" for constructing a good track
(probably because they flew too low. So, trying to figure out how the
authors obtained the results they published, is still a problem.

Since all their details lead to the conclusion that they experimentally
confirmed that the bees they radar-tracked in that study might have used A
DL that cannot exist in the real world, this means that those bees used a
non-existent DL; which is, of course, impossible! This leaves me with the
only remaining alternative, i.e. that there was something, or other, wrong
with the the presence of observers at the experimental feeder, and that they
tracked only bees with individual number-tags, i.e. bees with a fully known
previous history, that never visited the experimental feeder at that
experimental area before. This precludes my favorite suspicion that the bees
tracked in that specific study were re-recruited trained foragers (who might
have lost their tags), and not regular foragers.

What I do know however (from one of the authors), is that the published
information about the season in which that study was done is a typo. The
study was not done in 2000, but in 2001, together with another study
published in PNAS (2005), done in 1999 & 2001. The experimenters spent only
about 3 weeks on the field work in each season. At least 3 other types of
bees were tracked during the 2001 season. The bees were tracked during any
time of the day, with bees of the 4 different types tracked in no specific
order. Except that only a single bee could be tracked at one time. I also
know that Menzel & Greggers were involved in monitoring the work done at the
hive, and at the experimental feeder, but they had 8 other helpers (thanked
in the acknowledgement). Could the tracking of 4 different types of bees in
no specific order, and the involvement of 10 different people in the field
work  (other than monitoring the radar), have opened the door to inadvertent
errors? I don't know.

One thing is, however, certain: *The authors* *did not obtain an
experimental confirmation for the existence of any honeybee DL*. And this is
the only issue that really matters!
--
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")

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