Editing Bee learning and communication (section)

==Cognition==
Experiments by [[James L. Gould|James Gould]] suggest that honey bees may have a [[cognitive map]] for information they have learned, and utilize it when foraging. In an experimental demonstration,<ref>Gould, J L "A honey of a question, are bees intelligent?" Discover, 1986, August</ref> Gould lured some bees to a dish of artificial nectar, then gradually moved it farther from the hive.  He marked the trained bees, placed them in a darkened jar, and relocated them to a spot where the dish could not be seen but the hive was still visible. When released one by one, the bees appeared disoriented for a few seconds, then flew directly to the dish, 73 of 75 bees reaching it in about 28 seconds.  They apparently accomplished this feat by devising a new flight path based on a cognitive map of visible landmarks.

Interpretations of another test suggested not only the use of a map, but also an ability to remember and combine relevant information. Gould moved a supply of sugar water 25% farther away from a hive each day. The bees communicated the location of the water to each other as usual.  Then a researcher in his lab placed the sugar water on a boat in the middle of a small lake.  When scouts returned to the hive to communicate their find, Gould claimed that other bees refused to go with them, even though they frequently flew over the lake to reach pollen sources on the opposite shore. To Gould, these observations suggested that "bees somehow consider information to see if it makes sense before they act on it".<ref>Miller, J A "Biology" Science News; 4/23/1983, Vol. 123 Issue 17, p271, 1/6p</ref> No one observed behavior of bees in the hive during this experiment, however, and when the experiment was replicated by Wray et al. in 2008, the researchers found no evidence for Gould's assertion that followers of waggle dances advertising "implausible" sites refused to respond to these dances. The authors' conclusion: "Contrary to prior findings, our results provide no evidence that honeybees assess the plausibility of information contained in waggle dances or reject dances for locations that are unlikely to yield food. Thus, we conclude that the original Lake Experiment should no longer be cited as evidence
that honeybees possess cognitive maps, ‘insight’ or ‘imagination’."<ref>Wray MK, Klein BA, Seeley TD. 2011. Honey bees use the social information in waggle dances more fully when foraging errors are more costly. Behavioral Ecology. 23:125-131. doi:10.1093/beheco/arr165</ref>