As an ethologist Jerry (my wife background and she worked for one of the three europeans who won the nobel for their early pioneering work in the field) you might suggest to ALL that you don't reflect human perception and feeling onto other species

You are correct.  The problem with honey bees is there's no end to the anthropomorphic references in honey bee literature and jargon.  We can start with 'honey' bee - although some might argue with me on this one.   Then there's Division of Labor (as if bees belonged to trades or unions).  Queen bee, Worker Bee, Nurse Bee, Guard Bee, Bee Dances, Round Dance.  And then the beekeepers and press who refer to our operant conditioning of bees, using their olfactory systems to discover things as Sniffer Bees!   I've yet to see a bee sniff anything.  And the list goes on and on.  Bees are claimed to show symptoms of diseases, yet from my training the proper term would be 'signs'.  I also wonder why anyone thinks that just because the bee has compound eyes, that the bee 'sees' a world as a mosaic of images - that's like looking at rods and cones in our eyes and assuming we'd see some form of pixelated view.  Tiny as it is, the bee has a brain - and I don't know what happens in their brains - but I doubt that the brain doesn't integrated the signals from the parts of the compound eye.  I can test the ability of bees to discriminate colors, shapes, edges, etc.  Clearly they can detect UV floral patterns  - we can't.  I've had students comment about the poor eyesight of bees - I'll bet if somehow we actually could 'talk' to bees, they'd consider our vision to be incredibly limited compared to theirs.


So, I've had to compromise.  It's a bit ridiculous to insist on proper terms when the whole discipline is rift with anthropomorphisms.   And the press and the public rarely understands operant conditioning, but they do understand 'training'.  Symbolic Language = Dance Language - the anthropomorphic terms extend back to our instructors who chastised us for using incorrect terms, then added to these terms themselves.




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