Wk+6

The video mentioned in the bee communication article is no longer available, but I found a good replacement on youtube. []

I'm going to read paper #1 just like last time there were only 3 papers- Evy- Any in this article I found... A lot of well written information about bee communication and the types of experiments that are involved. I find myself comparing the dances that bees perform to song maps that I've heard about. Songs that when sung lead you somewhere. Like "left at the treeeeee....three right steps towards the hills!!!!!" I tried to find maybe an article on song maps on google scholar and found nothing. Anyways let's pretend they exist in hunter gatherer tribes and were part of the early human tool-set. Is a song that gives directions language? It tells you something out of context. i.e. your sitting around a campfire singing a map song that leads to the special cave and someone who has never been to the special cave gets up and goes to find it. What about a map-dance? Sure now you can't give someone directions in the dark like you could with a song but still you can give someone directions. What if you took out all the references to landmarks in your dance-map and referenced the position of the sun instead. //to sing a song you have to have words..... why dance if you can point? just playing devils advocate here. I find the dance idea intriguing because it is like an iconic way of communication and dance is universal.//

I suppose if you take the "ands" and "the's" out of a language, and made all the words iconic then you would only have a code that gives directions. Additionally since Bee's only do that type of dancing for directions the dance can never be out of context. BeeLinda is dancing= she is giving directions to food. If HumanLinda is dancing it could mean she has an ant in her pants, she is feeling emotional, or she is telling a story.

It is surprising to see the detail that bees have regarding a communication system for food retrieval but it makes sense that this is how it would be. Since they don't need to worry about attracting mates (as most species spend nearly all of their time doing) because the queen bee has the offspring so the majority of their efforts are for food retrieval and supplying the hive with nutrients. I think the point about scent marking is a really important part, because many insects release scent markers as the main mode of communication, bees use the natural smells of the food to help show where it is located. //Time and food cannot be the primary motivators behind the phenomena of bee dance. It has to be niche driven, and the niche requiring recruitment. Otherwise bumblebees and other hive forming animals would do the same thing.//

__//Bee Language Translation//__ Round dance: "Bees, I smell food, search the area near here." Quick Tail-Wagging Dance: "Bees, I smell food, search farther out from here." Slower Tail-Wagging Dance (For a longer period of time):"Bees, go in search of the food //even farther// away from here." Tail-Wagging Dance points up: "Food is toward the direction of the sun."

Found it interesting that the bees must stay very close to the dancer in order to receive the message. I read in another video that if the bees do not understand the dancing bee, and need it to communicate more to them, they will all gang up on it and sting it.

Here is a clear video of a forager bee dancing; start at 1:30 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaszh2bY3mc&feature=related

__**Wikipedia names:**__

//My wikipedia name shall be Sylvia253 :)//
My wikipedia name is soffar16 Huxley1860- Evelyn Wikipedia name is Newlau31Laura Mine is gansam12---Sami

a) there is a "start class" article about "the language instinct" that would leave a lot of possibilities for improvement. what I do not know, is what the difference is if it is on a "talk page" and how it moves from a talk page to an actual article...... ?????? b) there also is a stub on bow wow theory? __**Articles:**__ on the ant article the key point for me is page 58 "...the question of interest is why the african weaver ant employs more complex communication." That is the point of niche construction right there. I also read the raven article but it is not clear to me at all, there does not appear to be any research?, but the note on page 3 that refers to the communication difference in bees versus bumblebees points the same direction.
 * __As far as possible subjects__** are concerned,