ABSTRACT
The literature on honey bees is so vast and incorporates contributions from such a wide range of different disciplines that few, if any, working scientists even pretend to be familiar with all of it. Martin Lindauer's procedure for deciphering the history of the dance language was to analyze it from a functional perspective, under the assumption that a more direct, simpler communication system would be ancestral to a more indirect and complex system. Lindauer took the dance language of florea to be a prototype of the ancestral Apis. Thus, even though the cladistic analysis presented supports the genealogical relationships among Apis species that Lindauer derived from his comparative study of the dance language, that does not mean that every element of his elaborate evolutionary scenario receives unequivocal support. A cladogram is only a hypothesis about common ancestor relationships.
