Julian O'Dea routed us to his article at:
http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-13/ns_jdo.html
which includes:  "Evidently, therefore, bees and other insects may perform
information-laden movements that are not communicative".

I hesitate to enter this debate , but  Julian's article makes extraordinary
reading.  Julian seems to say, if I understand aright, that the dance of
honeybees DOES contain information on where the bee found food - but that
other bees do not read this, but just blunder out to search 5 square miles
for a particular ordor.  This seems tantamount to saying that bees can
'write' but not 'read', when a glance at the map would save so much time.
To my mind,  the probability must be that writing and reading are two sides
of the same coin. So, as I say, an extraordinary conclusion.



Robin Dartington

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