The claim for this "discovery" has been published by Sue et al.
(2008), in the free access journal PLoS One, 3(6), and quickly touted
in the popular scientific news-media.
Every one knows of the "discovery" of the amazing honeybee "dance
language" (DL), which earned Karl von Frisch the Nobel Prize in 1973.
The existence of such a DL has never yet been experimentally
confirmed, in spite of an almost endless series of futile attempts, by
very many different scientist all over the world, during more than 60
years. Moreover, no one ever could experimentally confirm the
existence of such a DL, because v. Frisch's DL hypothesis was
stillborn, based on his own research, more than 20 years before its
inception. Staunch DL sup****ters, however, refuse to accept the demise
of their enchanting "dream", no matter what.
Sue et al. managed to establish, with considerable efforts, a viable
mixed honeybee colony, with workers of two different species, a strain
of the European Apis mellifera, and a strain of Apis cerana from the
Far-East, (as long as the queen was an A. cerana queen). Dance-
attendants presumably obtain and use direction-information from the
duration of the waggle-run of waggle-dances performed by their
foragers. The duration of waggle-runs in dances of one of the authors'
two species are, however, very different from the durations in the
dances of foragers from the other species. From the point of view of
staunch DL sup****ters like Sue et al. this means that the two species
each use a different "dialect". One would, therefore, expect that DL
information in the dances of foragers of the one species would
"mislead" dance-attendants of the other species.
Sue at al., however, found that dance-attendants were not "misled" by
dances of foragers from the other species than their own. The authors,
then, concluded that bees from each species somehow learned to
correctly interpret the distance-information provided by dancers from
the other species. Not surprisingly, the authors very seriously
believe they have made an incredibly amazing new discovery; even
though they cannot even begin to imagine how honeybees can accomplish
anything like that.
The answer is, of course, very simple, and very mundane. But trust
staunch DL sup****ters to completely miss it. Dance-attending recruits
were not misled by the "misleading" distance- information contained in
the dances of the foragers from the other species, not at all because
they learned to understand the other "dialect", but because they do
not use any DL information in the first place!
It is all utterly hilarious, and also very, very sad!
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