A recent paper (Schürch R, Grüter C (2014) Dancing bees improve colony foraging success as long-term benefits outweigh short-term costs. PLoS ONE 9: e104660. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104660.) by Schürch and Grüter models exactly the sort of communication disruption experiment carried out here. They conclude, amongst other things, that in such experiments "the benefits of communication were considerably underestimated or not detected at all". This suggests that if this experiment were to be re-run with longer treatment blocks, stronger or different effects may be seen. I am not suggesting the conclusions drawn here are not valid - only that even stronger effects could likely be observed with longer treatment blocks.

The Schürch and Grüter paper is also published in PLoS one, can be accessed here:
http://www.plosone.org/ar...