We know that shortly after WWII v. Frisch published his amazing
"discovery" of the of the honeybee "dance language", whereby honeybee-
recruits "instinctively" obtain and use spatial information, contained
in foragers'-dances, about the location of their foragers' food-site,
to help them find the source on their own. The "discovery" soon became
a revered ruling paradigm, which earned v. Frisch world wide fame,
including numerous prestigious prizes, and finally also the Nobel
Prize, in 1973; a full 6 years after Wenner & his team had already
discovered, and published in 1967, that honeybee-recruits use only
odor, and were "rewarded" by being quickly turned into pariahs.
The free weekly online Science News e-Letter has an interesting
practice. In its Timeline it always includes items published in
Science News during the same week 70 years ago. The Timeline for Oct.
5, 2007, thus reproduces verbatim the re****t on v. Frisch's honeybee-
research, as published in Science News of Oct. 2, 1937. The re****t is
a bit fuzzy, and provides no reference. (They apparently did not
bother about such matters then.) But examining the article by Frisch
(1937). The language of bees. Science Progress, 32(125): 29-37, makes
it quite clear that the re****t could only have been based on that
article, that was in turn based on a guest lecture v. Frisch had
delivered at the University College of London, in 1937, on all his
honeybee-research.
The article by Frisch (1937) clearly shows that v. Frisch's pre-WWII
studies on honeybee-recruitment, had already led him to conclude that
honeybee recruits use only odoir; that the conclusion was fully
justified; and that his results already grossly contradicted his post-
WWII "dance language". After the "discovery" of his post WWII "dance
language", he suppressed his pre-WWII results, which discredited the
"discovery". No wonder, in spite of 60 years of almost endless
attempts, by scientists all over the world, no one has yet been able
to experimentally confirm the existence of v. Frisch's post-WWII
"dance language".
Wenner & his team, did not realize that they were being punished for
having unknowingly rediscovered and published in 1967, what v. Frisch
had already discovered and published much earlier, (with a very
extensive German summary actually published in 1923), until I
accidentally stumbled on a reprint of Frisch (1937) in The 1939 Annual
Re****t of the Smithsonian Institution, and published the find in vol.
84 of J. theoret. Biol. of 1980. The reprint was later cited in the
1990 book by Wenner & wells; Anatomy of a Controversy: The Question of
a "Language" Among bees. Another reprint of Frisch (1937) was then
published, (with an introduction by Wenner), in Bee World in 1993.
The honeybee "dance language" controversy actually concerns the very
foundations of the whole field of behavioral science, i.e. the problem
of the existence of "instincts". aunch "dance language" sup****ters,
nonetheless, still persist in ignoring the article by Frisch (1937).
It is, therefore, pleasing to find that the "ghost of that publication
has now arisen to still haunt and taunt" them.
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