"where is the hard evidence that bees cannot communicate with each other?

Capping a rather polite flame war:

From: prismx@earthlink.net
Subject: [SciPol 175] Re: Item no. 6 in the ScienceWeek list for Feb. 23, 2007.
Date: February 28, 2007 8:00:03 AM PST
To: scipol@googlegroups.com
Reply-To: scipol@googlegroups.com

This bee-dance controversy is an old item on the Internet, here
revived maybe by a transgendered Ruth Rosin writing as "Ross
Goodyear". That's fine. But I think it would be helpful to cut posts
to eliminate dragging along everything written before -- keep things
short. And second, I would like to see some discussion of the fact
that the opponents of the dance idea have plenty of rhetoric and
hardly and published evidence to support their position. Claims that
this or that idea was "stillborn" fifty years ago don't do much for
science. Rhetorical criticisms of published experiments also don't do
much. We need experimental data, current and contemporary
experimental data, that contradicts the prevailing view -- if that
prevailing view is to be discarded. Arguments that Wenner did this or
that years ago are baloney -- if no one is taking the time to repeat
Wenner's experiments. Arguments that appear in the American Bee
Journal are not evidence of anything -- it's a trade journal for
beekeepers, not a scientific journal manned by scientists. So my
suggestion is never mind the rhetoric, where is the hard evidence
that bees cannot communicate with each other? They certainly
communicate enough to form an insect "society". It would certainly be
adaptive if "scouts" could communicate in some way the existence and
location of flower beds. The problem of implied "mathematical
reasoning" is vacuous, since a crystal forms an almost perfect
geometrical arrangement without ever "thinking" about it. It seems to
me a large part of the so-called dance controversy lies in some
people imposing an implicit dichotomy between human solutions and
"animal" solutions. But these are all biological solutions,
ultimately based on physiology and physics and chemistry, and in
principle there is no reason why the nervous system of one bee could
not communicate with the nervous system of another bee. So please
let's can the rhetoric and talk about hard evidence. As for people
who have not heard about the bee dance controversy before, please be
advised that most of the biologists working today accept the view
that a bee dance "language" of some sort exists. Of course they may
be wrong, but no one has yet proved them wrong.

Dan Agin