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ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
 Posted: 24-06-2012 11:59 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Bee swarm attack lands Thailand monks in hospital
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18568448
Related Stories
Bees attack India paramilitaries
Dozens of novice monks have been taken to hospital after an attack by a swarm of bees in northern Thailand.
The monks were cleaning the Chedi Luang temple in Chiang Mai province on Saturday when the attack took place.
The Bangkok Post said more than 70 monks were admitted to hospital, quoting one doctor as saying he had seen 19 in serious condition.
Bee stings typically cause skin rashes and nausea but multiple attacks are more serious and occasionally deadly.
Temple abbot Phra Ratcha Jetiyajarn told the Post that 76 monks had been taken to three regional hospitals.
The paper quoted Naren Chotirosnimitr, the director of the Maharaj Nakorn hospital in Chiang Mai, as saying 53 had been treated there, with six arriving in a coma suffering with low blood pressure.
Most of the monks were later discharged.
The abbot said the bees were from hives kept at the temple. They had been no problem previously and it was unclear why they had attacked, he said. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 16-07-2012 01:45 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Customers make beeline for exit in Creeslough
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0714/1224320063116.html
STEPHEN MAGUIRE
Sat, Jul 14, 2012
A swarm of bees gathered outside a supermarket in Co Donegal yesterday, forcing customers away for a number of hours.
An estimated 40,000 of the Black Irish honey bees tried to made their home outside Lafferty’s supermarket in the village of Creeslough.
The shop, which is normally buzzing, was almost empty for more than four hours before help was called to get rid of the bees.
Danny Martin Lafferty, owner of the supermarket, said the bees definitely took the sting out of his afternoon trade. “I looked outside and I could see people waving their arms. It looked like it was snowing for a while.
“Then I looked closer, and I could see this cloud of bees,” he said.
Mr Lafferty called a local beekeeper, who arrived with the necessary equipment to get rid of the swarm. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 06-08-2012 22:20 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Swarm of bees tells Hillary Clinton to 'buzz off'
http://www.rt.com/news/hillary-clinton-bees-mawali-962/
Published: 06 August, 2012, 17:58
Hillary Clinton’s six-and-a-half hour trip to Malawi literally went by in a buzz. The US Secretary of State has received not-so-warm welcomes from several countries she’s visited, but in Malawi she was reportedly chased onto her plane.
Chased onto her plane by a swarm of bees, that is.
Clinton ran for cover and boarded her jet to escape the bees, which attacked her at Malawi’s international airport, the local Nyasa Times quotes witnesses as saying. The Secretary was preparing to board a Johannesburg-bound flight when the stinging swarm forced her to make a quicker entry than planned.
Clinton wasn’t the only one spooked by the bees: “There was a slight panic as the bees winged across the airport. People could be seen running away to keep cover as the Secretary of State swiftly boarded her plane to avoid any stings,” a witness told the Nyasa Times. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 15-09-2012 22:46 Post subject: |
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Once again European interlopers bring disease to the New World.
| Quote: | Plight of the Bumblebee
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/09/plight-of-the-bumblebee.html?ref=hp
by Anthony King on 14 September 2012, 6:25 PM | 1 Comment
Bad buzz. A deadly parasite, possibly carried by European bees imported for pollination, is infecting Patagonia's native giant bumblebee, Bombus dahlbomii.
Credit: Carolina Morales
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they carried measles, flu, and smallpox to the native peoples. Now history is repeating itself—in the world of bees. The introduction of a European bumblebee to South America—and the parasite that the bee carries—may have decimated populations of that continent's indigenous "giant bumblebee," scientists reported last week in Biological Invasions.
The queen bees of the spectacular native "giant bumblebee" of South America, Bombus dahlbomii, are the largest bumblebees in the world. B. dahlbomii once ranged across thousands of kilometers of Patagonia, the cool, southernmost tip of South America, where it was the only bumblebee species. But the species' burly size has not kept it safe: Populations of the native bee have declined sharply in recent years.
The spotlight of suspicion is now on a recent arrival, the European white-tailed bumblebee (B. terrestris), which was introduced into Chile in 1997 to pollinate agricultural crops. The European bee escaped from greenhouses and outdoor pollination sites into the wild; researchers observed it in Patagonia by 2006. At about the same time, the giant bumblebee began to disappear from this area.
The link between those two events, scientists suspect, may be a deadly single-celled parasite that hitchhiked to Patagonia along with the European invader. In the new study, scientists identified the parasite, Apicystis bombi, in three species of bumblebee—the native bumblebee; B. terrestris; and another European bumblebee, B. pascuorum—in Patagonia. The parasites wreak havoc on the bees, starting off as a gut infection and spreading to other parts of the body. They cause behavioral effects, increase worker bee death rates, and impede the founding of new colonies.
"There is evidence that this parasite was introduced with Bombus terrestris and spilled over to other species here in the region," says Marina Arbetman, lead study author and Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Río Negro in Argentina.
The parasite is certainly a relatively recent arrival: In the study, Arbetman and her team looked at preserved specimens of the native bee as well as B. pascuorum, also called the carder bumblebee. The carder bee first arrived in South America in the 1980s, but researchers could not detect the parasite's DNA in the preserved specimens.
A Weekly Chat on the Hottest Topics in Science Thursdays 3 p.m. EDT
The parasite is rare in bees in Europe, found in only 1% to 8% of white-tailed bees. However, it is surprisingly common in the European bumblebees living in Patagonia, the researchers found—almost half of the white-tailed bees in the region were infected, as well as the native giant bumblebees.
"We are not saying that the decline is only due to parasites," says co-author and bee biologist Carolina Morales of Argentina's national research council. For example, competition for food with the European bees could also be responsible for species decline. However, the speed of the native bee decline suggests that the parasite is a major factor, she says—and other native bumblebees north of Patagonia may be at risk from the parasite.
Indeed, "the giant bumblebee appears to have disappeared from 80% of its range," says bee biologist David Goulson of the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom. "I went out there earlier this year and hunted high and low for them, but couldn't find a single one." A clash over food or territory alone wouldn't be likely to decimate the giant bumblebees, he says. "The native bee has a long tongue and tends to feed on deep flowers that Bombus terrestris wouldn't feed on, so they really shouldn't be competing. The only sensible explanation that fits is that terrestris is carrying some kind of disease, and this one seems to be a pretty good candidate."
Goulson predicts the giant bumblebee species could be extinct within a few years—and adds that there could be wider ecological implications, as a lot of wild plants in the Andes will lose their main pollinator. "It is incredibly frustrating for people like me who are trying to conserve things that some idiot can do so much damage by bringing in an alien bee."
Still, it's not certain that European bees are primarily responsible for bringing this particular parasite to South America—or even that A. bombi is the only parasite involved. "There is correlational evidence to suggest that this parasite may have either been brought in or hugely increased in its abundance by the invasive bumblebee, but there is no causal evidence. It's not a smoking gun," says evolutionary biologist Mark Brown of Royal Holloway, University of London. "I don't think they can conclude that the parasite wasn't in native bumblebees in Patagonia prior to Bombus terrestris arriving, because the sample size was not large enough to do that." (That small sample size was due to the difficulty in locating surviving native bees, according to the researchers in Argentina.) Furthermore, Brown says, "if this parasite was introduced to native bees by commercial bees then it is highly likely that other parasites would have crossed over at the same time."
Morales, however, says that the study highlights a fearsome cautionary tale. Many companies export bumblebee species, sending them around the world to pollinate crops such as the tomato. The research, she says, paints a picture of what could happen if infected European species entered bumblebee-rich places such as China and Nepal—that is, assuming this parasite is just as detrimental to their bees. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 26-09-2012 18:15 Post subject: |
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Still seeking the killer. Time to call in CSI?
| Quote: | Honeybee homicide case against Syngenta pesticide unproven
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/bre88j11l-us-bees-pesticide/
By Chris WickhamPosted 2012/09/21 at 6:55 am EDT
LONDON, Sep. 21, 2012 (Reuters) — British scientists have shot down a study on declining honeybee populations that triggered a French ban on a pesticide made by Swiss agrochemicals group Syngenta.
A bee is seen sitting on a Marigold flower in a field of a private plantation near the village of Pishchalovo, about 220 km (138 miles) east of Minsk in this July 18, 2011 file photogaph. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko/Files
France's farm minister Stephane Le Foll withdrew Syngenta's marketing permit for the pesticide Cruiser OSR in June, citing evidence of a threat to the country's bees.
But a study by Britain's Food and Environment Research Agency with the University of Exeter says the results of the original research were flawed.
The study, published in the journal Science, does not deny that pesticides could be harmful to individual bees but argues there is no evidence they cause the collapse of whole colonies.
"We do not yet have definitive evidence of the impact of these insecticides on honeybees and we should not be making any decisions on changes to policy on their use," said James Cresswell, the ecotoxicologist who led the latest study.
The previous research, led by French scientist Mikaël Henry and published in Science in April, showed the death rate of bees increased when they drank nectar laced with the neonicotinoid pesticide, thiamethoxam, the active ingredient in Cruiser OSR.
Neonicotinoids are among the most widely-used agricultural insecticides.
Henry's work calculated this would cause a bee colony to collapse completely but Cresswell said the French study seemed to have used an inappropriately low birth rate, underestimating the rate at which colonies can recover from the loss of bees.
"They modeled a colony that isn't increasing in size and what we know is that in springtime when oilseed rape is blossoming they increase rapidly," Cresswell told Reuters.
The French study has been cited by scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers as evidence of the impact of these pesticides on bees, which are declining around the world.
"We know that neonicotinoids affect honeybees, but there is no evidence that they could cause colony collapse," said Cresswell. "When we repeated the previous calculation with a realistic birth rate, the risk of colony collapse under pesticide exposure disappeared."
DOSAGE DOUBTS
Cresswell said Henry's research also used a dosage of pesticide equivalent to a whole day's intake by the bees, akin to testing the effect of coffee on people by making them drink eight cups in one go, rather than spread out over the day.
Henry said he was "perfectly comfortable" with the new findings, adding in an emailed response to Reuters: "The model we used predicts a major deviation from the expected colony dynamics, rather than a collapse per se."
The April paper in Science said exposure to thiamethoxam "causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse".
Syngenta lost a court bid in July to overturn the French ban on Cruiser OSR, which meant the pesticide was not used for rapeseed sowing in August and September.
"It's important for us that what we had argued is now supported by a scientific study," Syngenta France spokesman Laurent Peron told Reuters. "We are going to use the findings of this study but it's too early to say in what way."
The French farm ministry declined to comment.
Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth argued that sales of the pesticide should be halted while any doubt about their impact on bees remained.
"Neonicotinoid pesticides cannot be given a clean bill of health until they have been properly tested for their effect on all bees, not just honeybees," said campaigner Paul de Zylva.
Cresswell said: "I am definitely not saying that pesticides are harmless to honeybees, but I think everyone wants to make decisions based on sound evidence, and our research shows that the effects of thiamethoxam are not as severe as first thought."
(Additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris; Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Pravin Char) |
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| EnolaGaia Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Total posts: 1304 Location: USA Gender: Male |
| Posted: 04-10-2012 14:37 Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
Blue and green honey makes French beekeepers see red
By Patrick Genthon | Reuters
MULHOUSE, France (Reuters) - Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M's candy processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.
Since August, beekeepers around the town of Ribeauville in the region of Alsace have seen bees returning to their hives carrying unidentified colorful substances that have turned their honey unnatural shades.
Mystified, the beekeepers embarked on an investigation and discovered that a biogas plant 4 km (2.5 miles) away has been processing waste from a Mars plant producing M&M's, bite-sized candies in bright red, blue, green, yellow and brown shells.
Asked about the issue, Mars had no immediate comment.
The unsellable honey is a new headache for around a dozen affected beekeepers already dealing with high bee mortality rates and dwindling honey supplies following a harsh winter, said Alain Frieh, president of the apiculturists' union.
Agrivalor, the company operating the biogas plant, said it had tried to address the problem after being notified of it by the beekeepers.
"We discovered the problem at the same time they did. We quickly put in place a procedure to stop it," Philippe Meinrad, co-manager of Agrivalor, told Reuters.
He said the company had cleaned its containers and incoming waste would now be stored in a covered hall.
Mars operates a chocolate factory near Strasbourg, around 100 km (62 miles) away from the affected apiaries.
Bee numbers have been rapidly declining around the world in the last few years and the French government has banned a widely used pesticide, Cruiser OSR, that one study has linked to high mortality rates.
France is one of the largest producers of honey within the European Union, producing some 18,330 tonnes annually, according to a recent audit conducted for national farm agency FranceAgriMer.
Ribeauville, situated on a scenic wine route southwest of Strasbourg, is best known for its vineyards. But living aside winemakers are about 2,400 beekeepers in Alsace who tend some 35,000 colonies and produce about 1,000 tonnes of honey per year, according to the region's chamber of agriculture.
As for the M&M's-infused honey, union head Frieh said it might taste like honey, but there the comparison stopped.
"For me, it's not honey. It's not sellable."
SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/blue-green-honey-makes-french-beekeepers-see-red-112903015.html
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 04-10-2012 14:39 Post subject: |
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| Excellent! Should be an M&M ad about it. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2734 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-10-2012 13:08 Post subject: |
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| Coloured Honey! Kerching! |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
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| monops Great Old One Joined: 07 Nov 2006 Total posts: 149 Location: Cambridge, UK Age: 51 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 18-10-2012 21:24 Post subject: |
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| Signed. |
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| Spudrick68 Great Old One Joined: 08 Jun 2008 Total posts: 1110 Location: sunny Morecambe Age: 45 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-10-2012 22:40 Post subject: |
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| Signed. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 19-10-2012 00:56 Post subject: |
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| Signed. |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 19-10-2012 20:02 Post subject: |
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| Thanks, everybody! |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 19-11-2012 23:20 Post subject: |
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Extra support for Welsh speaking bees.
| Quote: | Talks in Aberystwyth over Welsh bee decline action plan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-20390778
The action plan hopes to halt the decline of bees
The progress of an action plan to protect endangered insect pollinators like honey bees and hoverflies in Wales is being discussed in Aberystwyth.
The value of pollinators to the UK government is estimated to be £430m a year, but populations have been on the decline for 30 years.
The Welsh government launched the action plan at the Royal Welsh Show in Powys in July.
Since then a review has looked at the reasons for the insects' decline.
The action plan will be developed in partnership with key agencies and might include changes to the planning system to help make development "pollinator friendly".
Other plans include planting more bee-friendly plants in areas such as railway embankments and road verges.
The Welsh government will hold a workshop at Aberystwyth University on Monday to share the results of its review with Friends of the Earth Cymru, the Welsh Bee Keepers' Association and wildlife trusts.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
There are issues about the use of pesticides which many beekeepers believe are having a disastrous effect”
Peter Barrar
National Bee Keeping Centre Wales
Peter Barrar, a director of National Bee Keeping Centre Wales, said: "A number of policies and programmes will be put forward for discussion and hopefully we're going to have a situation where we have an action plan that (can be implemented) throughout Wales, and addresses some of the really key issues that are facing pollinators, not just in Wales, but throughout the UK as a whole and elsewhere."
Mr Barrar said there was probably four of five issues affecting pollinators.
"Firstly, I think we've got problems with the loss of natural habitats which have resulted from ways in which we now manage the land," he added.
"For example, 97% of the UK's wild flower meadows have disappeared since the 1930s. That's an incredible impact due to farming practices and so on.
"There are issues about the use of pesticides which many beekeepers believe are having a disastrous effect, on not just bees, but on other pollinators as well."
'Population decline'
Environment Minister John Griffiths said 20% of the UK's cropped area was made up of pollinator-dependent crops.
"In July I announced that Wales would produce an action plan for pollinators," he added.
"Since then a review has been undertaken in Wales to look at the reasons for the population decline and the impacts that such a decline will have upon our society.
"We now want to share this report with our relevant partners and take their views on how we can protect this vitally important eco-system service.
"Their views and expertise will be crucial is helping to shape this action plan which is the first of its kind in the UK." |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17931 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 29-11-2012 14:52 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Hive minds: Honeybee intelligence creates a buzz
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628921.700-hive-minds-honeybee-intelligence-creates-a-buzz.html?full=true
28 November 2012 by David Robson
Magazine issue 2892.
Bees can do remarkable things with a brain the size of a pinhead, raising some intriguing questions about the nature of intelligence
I CERTAINLY wouldn't want to meet this bunch in a dark alley. Some are sitting and glowering at me from the shadows, and others are brawling in an unruly scrum, their wings and limbs flailing against the sides of their Perspex prison. Every last one of them is armed, and I can't help wondering if they are planning some kind of coup. Fortunately, I am assured that they can be easily placated with a quick fix of the sweet stuff. "Mostly, our bees collaborate quite happily," says Lars Chittka, whose lab I am visiting at Queen Mary, University of London.
That's just as well, because these miniature brawlers show an extraordinary intelligence when they are given the chance to shine. Chittka and others have found that bees can count, read symbols and solve problems that would perplex some of the smartest mammals. Some have an eye for art appreciation, having been trained to pick either Monet or Picasso's paintings from a choice of the two artists' work. They may even have a form of self-awareness, and all of this with a brain the size of a pinhead. Studying how they are capable of such great ingenuity promises to reveal much about the evolution of intelligence. It might even provide a new perspective on the workings of our own brains.
Bees have long enjoyed our admiration. Ever since the ancient Egyptians began to cultivate their taste for honey, the hive has been revered for its apparent altruism and tireless work ethic. Whether bees themselves are intelligent has been a matter of dispute, however, with many considering each individual to be relatively stupid - a mindless cog in the greater honey-making machine. As the Latin proverb had it: "una apis, nulla apis" - "one bee is no bee".
Hints of apian intellect began to emerge with the research of Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. Working in the years around the second world war, he observed that foraging bees often perform a strange jive across the honeycomb - the famous "waggle dance", the steps of which signal the direction and distance to nearby flowers.
We have now uncovered a rich repertoire of behaviours under the hive lid. Studies of the choreography of the waggle dance, for instance, have revealed that a worker will interrupt another's jive with a butt to the head if it has found danger - a spider, say - at the location (Current Biology, vol 20, p 310). Bees also display an extraordinary range of housekeeping chores, including spring cleaning, mutual grooming and a form of surveillance in which "bouncers" guard entrances against intruders. The hive has even evolved its own air conditioning; when temperatures soar, the workers sprinkle water over the honeycomb and beat their wings to produce a cooling draft.
In total, Chittka estimates that we have now recorded around 60 separate behaviours for worker honeybees, including six different kinds of dance (Current Biology, vol 19, p R995). These achievements seem to overshadow the abilities of many mammals. Rabbits are thought to show about 30 distinct behaviours, and the beaver has about 50 in its busy life felling trees, building damns and storing food. Even the bottlenose dolphin's 120 or so routines are only about twice the number a worker honeybee manages.
Despite this bulging portfolio of behaviours, many zoologists have remained sceptical about apian intelligence, believing they were seeing hard-wired instinct rather than flexible thought. "The brain of a bee is the size of a grass seed and is not made for thinking," said von Frisch in 1962. However, that view is now changing, as Chittka and others discover a surprising mental agility behind the bee's bumbling exterior.
Chittka's first revelation came while he was investigating the way honeybees navigate to a flower patch. Varying the number of 3.5-metre-tall tents between a hive and a feeder - "It looked more like an art installation than an experiment" - he found that foragers seemed to count landmarks rather than using the overall distance when working out where to land. Subsequent research has confirmed this numeracy, showing that bees can match the quantity shown in simple pictures of shapes to find a reward. In one trial they were shown three leaves and then had to choose between two and three lemons, for instance - a test they passed with ease (see diagram). The ability to match signs using different symbols is crucial, showing that the bees did not just rely on a memory of a specific image but understood the underlying number. But this ability is limited: bees can only count to four.
Might bees be able to grapple with other abstract rules? This is a question that Martin Giurfa at the University of Toulouse, France, has explored over the past 10 years by testing bees' powers of categorisation. "Many people told us we were crazy - but we liked the challenge," he says. Giurfa started out by training his bees on the concept of symmetry and they quickly learned to sup on a sweet reward under symmetrical signs while avoiding asymmetrical pictures (Nature, vol 382, p 458). They have since learned spatial relationships such as above/below and left/right and have also mastered the concept of same/different. What is more, the bees easily transfer their learning to new situations - if they are trained to search for smells that are the same, they are subsequently able to pick visual signs that match, for instance (Nature, vol 410, p 930).
Giurfa's latest results are more impressive still. With colleague Aurore Avargués-Weber, he found that bees can combine concepts they have learned. When trained to search through pairs of shapes, for instance, they based their choice on the colour (whether the two shapes were the same shade, or different) and spatial arrangement (whether they were stacked vertically, rather than aligned side by side). "It presupposes a greater level of abstraction," says Giurfa. His bees mastered the task after just 30 trials, compared with the thousands of attempts required by some primates (PNAS, vol 109, p 7481). That's not all. Putting these skills to the test in a labyrinth, honeybees can learn to use abstract signs to find the way to a reward. Importantly, they can then grasp that the same signs mean different things in different mazes - suggesting an understanding of context (Journal of Comparative Physiology A, vol 181, p 343).
Many cognitive scientists believe that such deliberation reaches its apex in a trait known as metacognition. This ability to introspect and judge the quality of your own thoughts - whether you are certain about something or simply going on a hunch - is often considered to be the keystone of a conscious mind. Identifying metacognition in animals that lack language is a tough challenge but, through a series of canny tests, it has been demonstrated in just a small group of primates and dolphins. Now there is preliminary evidence that the honeybee may be a member of this select club.
Clint Perry at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, first trained his bees to discriminate between different images using tests of varying difficulty. In some later trials, he then gave them the option of an escape port if they didn't want to risk getting it wrong. Not only were the bees more likely to avoid the more difficult trials than the easier ones, they also took longer to decide on the harder tests. As a result of the escape port, they were also more likely to answer correctly on the trials they did decide to take, suggesting that the bees had accurately judged which trials they could and couldn't pass. Perry presented his preliminary results this year at the Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology at the University of Maryland in College Park, and although he hasn't yet published the full details of his experiments, Chittka thinks his conclusions are plausible. "This performance would certainly be taken as evidence for metacognition if the study was done with vertebrate subjects," he says.
As the bee's CV continues to grow, researchers have begun to ask how and why they evolved such a rich cognitive palette. Some clues might come from their nearest family. Although honeybees are among the most studied insects, there is plenty of evidence that many of their cousins - including bumblebees and ants - also show advanced learning. All these insects have particularly large and intricate "mushroom bodies" - the dense orbs of neural networks involved in learning and memory in the insect brain. Because bees and ants are mostly social creatures, this capacity was thought to have evolved to deal with the demands of living in a big group. A recent comparison, however, suggests that the expansion kicked off 90 million years ago in a solitary wasp that ultimately gave rise to all these social insects. If so, apian intelligence may have originated for hunting and overwhelming prey, before later being co-opted for a more cooperative and peaceful lifestyle.
Despite the expansion of its mushroom body, a bee's neural machinery is still minuscule compared with other intelligent creatures such as primates and cetaceans. Human skulls house about 85 billion brain cells, whereas a bee has fewer than a million in a brain measuring less than a millimetre cubed. How bees achieve so much with so little is a mystery, although their size might have some advantages. It takes less time to pass signals between neurons if they are closer together, which should mean that insect brains can process information more efficiently. These messages may also be less susceptible to electrical noise - something akin to the static sound on a bad phone line. Noise is a particular problem when communicating over long distances, so bigger brains use digital "on/off" firing that can persist through the crackle. Within the tiny insect brains, however, a graduated, "analogue" signal can hold up, with nuances in the amplitude conveying the information. "That can transmit huge amounts of information over a short amount of time," says Jeremy Niven, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
Cognitive shortcuts
Even so, it is likely that bees take cognitive shortcuts. "Insects force us to think about whether behaviours are as sophisticated as we think they are, or whether they are based on heuristics using simple assumptions," says Niven. Indeed, computer programs simulating the activity of neural networks suggest that apparently complex abilities such as counting and categorisation can be conjured from just a few hundred brain cells. Such results should be considered with some scepticism, because these models scrub away the messiness of the real world that undoubtedly needs more machinery to process. Nevertheless, alongside the achievements of bees, they do seem to confirm that relatively few neurons can go a long way when used efficiently. This could tell us as much about our own brains as those of the bee. "It could be that even we humans use rather simple techniques," says Mandyam Srinivasan at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia.
We shouldn't get carried away, though. Bees may have wide-ranging abilities, but Chittka suspects their talents do not run very deep. Consider perception. Bee vision is generally pretty poor - they tend to rely on the outlines of objects, while missing the fine details. That is partly a question of eyesight, but it may also be down to the amount of grey matter devoted to vision. Our visual world is much richer, and we are very good at processing many parts of a scene at once - which is why a familiar face in a crowd will jump out at us. Honeybees apparently lack this capacity for "parallel processing" - if they are looking for a certain colour in a sea of objects, they check each one in turn, as if they can't take in the whole scene with a single glance.
There is also a huge gulf in memory capacity. The limit of human recall has yet to be found; think of all the words you know, the people you recognise. Even smaller-brained animals such as pigeons can learn to recognise thousands of images. Although bees are quick to pick up new rules, they are soon overwhelmed by large quantities of new information. Honeybees can be trained to associate certain smells with the location of different feeding sites, for instance, but they become less accurate once the number of sites exceeds two. Their inability to form connections between different events will be one of their biggest limitations, says Niven. "It gives them less opportunity to make predictions about what's going to happen in the world around them."
Still, as a simple model of intelligence, bees have huge potential. "They give us a much better handle on the neural underpinnings," says Niven. As we learn more about how bees think, the hope is that eventually we will pin down the anatomy of intelligence - working out how different networks of neurons give rise to different skills.
If nothing else, the bright sparks I met in the lab might draw attention to the myriad other intelligent life forms hiding in our gardens and cupboards and crawling under our floorboards. Not just the honeybee's closest relatives, but also its mortal enemy, the spider, and even such maligned creatures as the cockroach. If bees have taught us anything, it is that we should be prepared to be surprised by what a tiny brain can do. "After so many years, I've lost my prejudice," says Giurfa. "I've learned to respect these animals."
Agent bee
Given bees' extraordinary sense of smell and quick wits, some researchers are wondering whether they could be used to sniff out trouble in war zones. Bees trained to associate a sugar solution with the smell of a commonly used explosive would hover around landmines, for example. A laser radar system could then be tuned to detect the light scattered from their beating wings, allowing the operators to view their movements over a large area, at a safe distance.
Bees' detective abilities might also be used in hospitals. Some illnesses, including certain kinds of cancer and tuberculosis, leave patients with telltale odours that a bee could be trained to associate with food. Then, if the distinctive smell is present on a sample of breath or urine, the bee would extend its tongue, a small movement that could be picked up by a camera to give a diagnosis. |
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