> Belief in bee language is really an emotional issue.  

Not so much for those who think that there is sufficient 
evidence to support bee language.  It appears to only be 
"emotional" for those who propose that the mass of evidence 
gathered to date is insufficient.

> If those who believe in bee language were firm in their 
> belief system, they would merely shrug off counter arguments.

This is an apt description of the reaction of the scientific
community as a whole to the counter-arguments offered to date.
I would tend to use the term "yawn" rather than "shrug", but
it is likely that some people both yawn and shrug.  Those of us 
who do not participate in peer review (such as beekeepers) are 
different, in that we find such discussions entertaining and
educational, and don't have any concerns about "reputations".


But let's ignore the meta-discussion of how someone might be
biased in one way or another, and focus on more tangible issues.

Let's even ignore the bees for a moment, and ask an easier question
about "odor" itself.  If bees don't use "dance information" at
all, and only use "odor", as Adrian insists, how do we explain the 
behavior of bees in regard to odorless plants and odorless nectar?

In the paper "Why Are Some Floral Nectars Scented?" (Robert A. Raguso 
of USC in "Ecology", 85(6), 2004, pp. 1486-1494), which can be 
found in full in this compendium:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~irwinlab/papers/Irwin_et_al_2004_SF_Intro.pdf
Robert states:

"Here I confirm the presence of scent 
in the nectar of four out of seven 
angiosperm species sampled with solid-phase 
micro-extraction and gas chromatography-mass 
spectrometry."

So if only 4 out of 7 nectars sampled had an odor detectable
with SPME GC/MS, a very high-tech approach to detecting chemicals
at very low levels, how do the other 3 plants get pollinated, and
how did they survive in the highly-competitive Darwinian scheme
of things? 

Clearly, the evidence of flower visual displays, including the
unique displays visible only under UV light provides evidence
that bees and other pollinators use their eyes.  Sure, odor can
help, but it is clearly not the only cue.  In some cases, it does 
not even appear to be a minor part of the process, such as in the
case where the nectar is odorless, thus making any odor-based
scenario for forager recruitment more than a little implausible.
(And please, let's not drag out "location odor" until someone
can explain how one specific "location" might smell different 
from another, and how one versus another could be found, given
a hive as a starting point.)

So, what percentage of plants that provide nectar have an odor
at all?  No one seems to know at present, but even a small 
number of such plants present significant hurdles to any
proposed foraging and recruitment scheme where odor might be
claimed to be mission-critical to the process.

I have "faith" that everyone will see the "reasoning" here.
I have faith IN reasoning.  :)

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