Adrian Wenner agrees that the bee dance contains distance and direction
information, and he asks why, if bees have a language, some bees take
hours to find the indicated food, and some never find it. If one asks
the question: do bees use the distance and direction information in the
dance to travel directly to the food, then the logical answer is that
some do not, which may lead on to a logical  conclusion that bees do not
have a language.

However, if one asks the question: how may bees use the information in
the dance to maximise foraging success, then the fact that some bees
take a long time to reach the indicated food source, or never do find
it, is consistent with the use by these bees of the information to avoid
the already-discovered source, in order to set out in other directions
to search for new locations of the same food which they seek to  locate
by odour. After failing to find new locations, they may eventually
arrive at the original indicated source, or may give up searching and
return to the hive. The logical answer to this question is that indeed
bees have a language.

Regards,
Barry Donovan
Canterbury Agriculture and Science Centre,
Lincoln,
New Zealand.




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