-----Original Message-----
From: Ruth Rosin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 10:18 AM
To: Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology
Subject: Re: [BEE-L] One of the major discoveries in behavioral biology
in the twentieth century

Indeed, v. Frisch was the first one to discover that honeybee
waggle-dances-dances contain information (which scientists can extract),
about the approximate distance & direction location of the site of food,
or what have you, that is repeatedly visited by the dancing foragerts.
There is nothing amazing about that; which you will understand if you
read my explanation of honeybee-dances.

V. Frisch, however, also believed that honeybee recruits can extract and
use that information, and innocently believed that he had successfully
experimentally confirmed that. It was this amazing claim, very
seriously, but  erroneously accepted by the scientific community, that
won him world wide fame. But, neither he, nor anyone else, have ever
achieved such a confirmation, and his pre-WWII results in tests on
honeybee-recruitment, suffice to show that it is most unlikely that
anyone ever could achieve such a confirmation.

End of a huge story that fizzled into nothing!




-- 
Sincerely,
Ruth Rosin ("Prickly pear")

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