24 October 2013 Mark Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois About the Author To read the post, please click here: The The Bumblebee and Robo-Snake on Mars – The Facts *D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D U U U U U U U U U *D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D U U U U U U U U U g 0 0 0 0 0 j 0 0 0 k 0 0 0 0 0 c 0 0 0 0 0 h 0 0 0 k 0 0 0 0 0 26 September 2013
In a time when worldwide bee populations are rapidly declining, the possibility of a world without bees looms large in the popular consciousness. How could agriculture, on any modern scale, survive in a beeless world? Often, China’s Sichuan Province is presented as an example — a miniature world without bees. The popular story of the Sichuan Province isn’t really a story. It’s a sentence. In the Sichuan Province, all pollination is done by hand because all the bees there were killed by pesticides in the 1980’s. Is this the story of tomorrow’s beeless world? A world in which human beings assume the bees’ “chore” of pollinating crops? The history and description of Sichuan, in a single sentence, is misleading. I found another, different story when I searched for the answer to an obvious question: If the Sichuan Province lost all of its bees in the 1980’s, why haven’t more bees been reintroduced? Why haven’t Sichuan beekeepers restocked hives and started over? And I was only one of many who had asked this same question. The surprising answer is that the Sichuan Province is beeless because the Sichuan farmers don’t want or need bees. A close look at Sichuan presents a surprising picture — one that is nothing like that single sentence suggesting a bee apocalypse. In the 1970’s, Sichuan produced most of the pears in China. But the pear harvests were modest and kept the residents living just above the poverty level. Then, in the mid 1980’s, two new varieties of pear trees were introduced to the province. With cross-pollination among these different species, both the production of pears and the farmers’ income dramatically increased. Then, in 1983, the Chinese government introduced yet another variety, Jinhuali Pears, which sold for an even higher price. However, Jinhuali presented a special problem because these trees flowered at a different time than the province’s other varieties of pear trees. Again, pear trees require interspecies cross-pollination. In simple terms, the Jinhuali tree will only bear fruit if its blossoms are pollinated with pollen from the blossoms of a different species of pear tree. The farmers couldn’t coordinate the appearance of Jinhuali blossoms with the blossoming any other variety of pear tree. They tried everything — everything but pollinating the Jinhuali by hand. Bingo! That was an idea. When the other pear trees blossomed, the Sichuan farmers gathered and preserved the needed pollen and, then, manually pollinated the late-blooming Jinhuali as soon as its blossoms appeared. They used sticks with chicken feathers or cigarette filters on the ends. Not only did manual pollination work, it produced better quality fruit and larger yields than ever before. Near poverty gave way to prosperity and, then, even more prosperity as pear trees replaced almost every other crop grown in Sichuan. And honeybees became increasingly unnecessary to the province’s agriculture. Manual pollination became the rule because it kept pear production strong. However, within a few years this prosperity was threatened when, for the first time, insects attacked the pear crop. To Sichuan’s farmers, pears were prosperity. The farmers spared no expense in buying and applying pesticide. Sichuan’s pear trees received, and continue to receive, more pesticide more often, than the trees of any other pear orchard on earth. The pears were saved from insect damage, but the pesticide produced severe collateral damage to the superfluous bee population. Of course, beekeepers complained but, from an economic standpoint, their complaints fell on deaf ears. Bees were not part of pear cultivation and production in Sichuan, and pear production was everything. After losing about half the bee population to pesticides, the beekeepers took their hives and left. At least to date, the beekeepers and their hives have never returned to Sichuan — the most bee-unfriendly province in the world. So, the story of Sichuan is not the story of an ecological or environmental disaster. If it is, the disaster was fully intended, planned, and executed with, from the farmers’ perspective, the coldest of blood. In fact, the farmers of Sichuan pushed the honeybees aside and rigorously engaged in hand pollination years before the use of pesticides. Sichuan is not the story of an unexpected chemical disaster, but an engineered preservation of a cash crop at the expense of the province’s bees. The only financial disaster came to those who were making a substantial income from beekeeping. However, there’s another question. Why is the real story of Sichuan so seldom told? Even after acquiring a fair knowledge of bees, I labored for more than a year under the mistaken impression that Sichuan’s farmers were living with an environmental curse left by an unexpected disaster. I wasn’t alone. I’ve read several articles with references to the Huaxia Bee Museum established in Central China’s Hubei Province to commemorate the lost honeybees of Sichuan. However, these references were inaccurate. The Huaxia Bee Museum is about China’s bees, but includes nothing related to Sichuan. In less than a minute, I could draw up over 100 articles that erroneously state that Sichuan’s farmers are “forced” to pollinate pear trees by hand because “pesticides wiped out the bee population” of their province. Of course, no “force” was ever involved. Not only were the farmers well established as better pollinators than the bees they replaced, but the rejection of the honeybee in favor of manual pollination happened years before pesticides were introduced. Sichuan aside, the current decline in bee populations is a real and urgent problem. Today, the named cause of North American bee disappearances and die-off’s is CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. Similar disappearances and die-off’s have been documented repeatedly throughout the past two centuries. And judging from the surviving records, periodic bee die-offs go back to the dawn of recorded civilization. The modern “European” (and American) honeybee was imported from Turkey after the disappearance of its European predecessor. However, it’s a mistake to treat CCD as if it were “business as usual.” There is one aspect of the modern statistics that is as unexplainable as it is ominous. Historic bee die-off’s were local events confined to certain regions or countries or climates. Today, however, domesticated bee populations are dramatically declining worldwide. Even by the most conservative estimates, both the rate and absolute numbers of the decline are alarming. A large population of healthy bees is indispensable to agriculture on a modern scale, and no group of people with feathers on sticks could replace our bees. Still, our fear is not a world without bees. Bee species will always be with us. Rather, our fear is a world with too few bees — or only bees of those species that are less than efficient pollinators. If the current population trends continue, it is possible to envision a world in which only the smallest fraction of our current agricultural yields would, or could, continue to be produced. With a decimated honeybee population, a good portion of the world would begin to starve — quickly. However, having taken care not to underestimate the value of the honeybee, I return to the earlier question: Why is the real story of Sichuan, the beeless province, so seldom told? Perhaps the question can’t be answered without answering another: What is the significance of the current die-off, not in terms of agriculture, but in terms of public perception? Do bees play some special role in the public imagination? Many articles about declining bee populations have a theme and tone that reminds me of those old sci-fi movies from the 1950’s. Somehow, human technological tampering with nature is punished in some awful (and bizarre) way. You can almost read this theme between the lines of more than a few articles — an echoed suggestion that some technological tinkering has angered Mother Nature. (Of course, today, she has a name, Gaea.) And we are being punished by the disappearance of our bees. Then, domino-like, all of modern civilization will fall to ruins. Viewed in this context, the mystery of the “Sichuan sentence” becomes more than just a misunderstanding or even a mistake. If it’s only an error, perhaps, it’s an error of convenience. The inaccurate impression of the Sichuan Province as the scene of a bee extinction fits almost too neatly into an increasingly pervasive, though less than articulate, mythology — the mythology of the bee apocalypse. But why worry? Isn’t a myth — the myth of a world without bees — a useful cautionary tale? Isn’t a fable, so interwoven with the dangers of modern technology, a good thing? In a word, no. Why? Because the mythology of our current bee die-off as divine retribution from God or Gaea, heaven or earth, conceals the actual problem by confusing it with our own most personal hopes and fears about both our technology and our future. Our bees and our agriculture — our food supply — are in real danger. This should drive us directly toward an understanding of the problem and, then, to a solution. And, most certainly, that solution will be technological and require more technology. Technology is not “the enemy” . . . nor is it necessarily “the friend.” Like any other resource, it can work for good or evil depending on how it is used. Like everyone, I wish that we could develop a technology that would police itself by stopping all future misuses of . . . itself. But that’s not likely to happen. The responsibility for regulating and directing the use of technology falls to us: All of us — every one of us. If we leave the job to someone else, some group of “experts,” we’ll get exactly what we deserve. No one knows if the common North American honeybee will survive, in significant numbers, into the future. It may have to be replaced with a less efficient bee or a less agreeable bee — like its Africanized cousin. At this date, no one is sure what role pesticides or herbicides play in the current die-off, though there is no end of press releases announcing that the “cause” has been found. However, our only real hope of saving the honeybee rests with the same technology that is, sometimes, implicitly condemned as “evil” and, often, ignored as the most probable solution. If we are to save our bees, we need to forget the myths and fables and remember the technology. Yes, in some way, almost every technological advance brings with it both a blessing and a curse. So, even if our technology is, in some measure, responsible for the problem of declining honeybee populations, that same technology will most certainly be the source of the solution. Shakespeare wrote, “Our faults . . . are not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Similarly, the fault is not in our technology, but in its developers, users, and regulators. Who are these developers, users, and regulars? Ultimately, dear reader, they are us. 29 August 2013 In the summer of 2012, bee enthusiast Megan O’Donald encountered a bumblebee in her mother’s garden in Briar, Washington. In the distant past, this would have hardly been noteworthy, but after the disappearance of bumblebees from Washington state, almost ten years ago, the sighting was an event. [1] In 2013, O’Donald saw another bumblebee in a goldenrod in the same garden. When Will Peterman, a freelance writer and photographer, heard about O’Donald’s sightings, he decided to “launch an expedition.” He identified several “patches of habitat” in small parks and unmown lots. Investigation of the first three sites yielded nothing but, at the fourth, he struck gold. [2] In Briar, Washington‘s Briar Park, he found and photographed several bumblebees. Several days later, Peterman returned to the park with a group of bee experts (entomologists) and, together, they located and photographed several bumblebee queens. It is estimated that the United States has lost almost half of its honeybee population in just the last seven years. However, the many species of the relatively petite honeybee differ in appearance, behavior, and habitat from that group of species called bumblebees. The relatively large and, somewhat, rotund bumblebee has also suffered a substantial disappearance in North America. Not long ago, the bumblebee was common throughout the Western United States and Canada. However, beginning in the late 1990’s, its numbers declined until it all but vanished from a vast area of its range extending from the Pacific Coast of California north into British Columbia. Mysteriously, bumblebee populations remained relatively unaffected in the mountainous portions of this same range. Unlike honeybees, bumbles are wild bees. They are not kept by beekeepers. However, their wild status makes them no less important to the agricultural industry. These bees are specially suited to pollinate a variety of cash crops including tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums and their unique style of pollination accounts for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year. Bumblebees are known for their characteristically loud buzz. However, unlike hive-dwelling honeybees, bumblebees don’t just buzz when they’re flying. They can, and do, produce that same buzz without moving their wings. And it is just the vibration from this flightless buzz that makes them uniquely valuable pollinators of certain crops. After landing in a blossom, the large bumblebee grabs the blossom and holds it tightly. While maintaining this tight grip, it strongly vibrates while remaining stationary. Nothing less than the bumblebee’s strong vibration will assure pollination by shaking loose sufficient quantities of the thick pollen produced by certain species of plants. No other bee could do this job as consistently or successfully. While the sighting of a few bumblebees in Washington state may not seem like much, Biologist Rich Hatfield, of the Xerces Society, believes that these few sightings hold the promise of a possible bumblebee repopulation of the their abandoned Western Range. [3] Also, these sightings came at a time when bee watchers needed some good news. Just a few weeks earlier, 50,000 bumblebees died, in mass, in an Oregon parking lot. The cause of the die-off remains unexplained. Even worse, these deaths came only one week before the beginning of the newly declared “National Pollinator Week.” The challenges to bumblebee survival grow out of its peculiar lifestyle. Unlike the petite honeybee, the bumblebee doesn’t maintain the familiar hive. Bumble queens locate their 12-inch wide nests rather opportunistically, in “clumps of dry grass, old bird nests, abandoned rodent burrows, old mattresses, car cushions or even in or under old abandoned buildings.” [4] Each bumblebee nest will be used for only a single year. And a colony will begin and end within that same year’s time. Each year, a new nest will be built and a new colony developed in a different location. Most colonies number only a few hundred bees, though rarely, numbers can reach as high as 2,000. The wild bumble’s nomadic lifestyle disburses its population. This works to their advantage by protecting them from the rapid, plague-like spread of diseases so common in the perennial and densely populated hives of the honeybee. Also, the freestyle foraging of this wild bee limits its exposure to systematically applied pesticides. Bumbles certainly suffer some collateral damage from pesticides and are vulnerable to certain diseases. However, pesticides and disease, the “usual suspects” in the disappearance of the honeybee, are less prominent contributors to the decline in bumble populations. Inspired by the honeybee colonies, human attempts to create similar domesticated bumble colonies led to one of the few documented disease outbreaks among these bees. When a few of the experimental, domesticated queens were imported from Europe to American, they brought with them a new fungal disease, which spread among some American bumblebees. In spite of this incident, and the plentiful speculation about the possible role of disease in declining American bumble populations, there is little evidence that any disease played a significant role in the massive North American disappearance. In fact, the healthy bumble population levels in the Western mountainous areas of North America and Canada argue against the disease theory. These unaffected populations suggest another cause — one more often associated with animals than insects: loss of habitat. Certain human activities have tremendously reduced the bumble’s natural habitat. Modern land management, agricultural and aesthetic, continues to eliminate the open, unmown grasslands and areas of brush that bumbles need for nesting. Over the past 40 years, agricultural planning and land-use have been revolutionized to provide maximum yields. But these modifications have destroyed vast areas of potential habitat — especially those close to sources of honey and, therefore, locations in need of pollinators. In the past, the typical farm included a substantial number of fallow tracts of land in which wild brush and unmown grass were allowed to grow. These areas provided breaks between fields to slow or prevent the spread of disease. Other uncultivated areas were buffers between different types of crops. This separation was intended to prevent bleed-over of one type of crop into fields dedicated to another. However, the practice of planting different types of crops was, again, a kind of insurance against the spread of disease. While one type of crop might fall victim to disease, another would be less susceptible and survive to produce a much-needed yield at harvest. And, finally, there was crop rotation. Some fields were periodically left fallow to prevent a loss of fertility. All of these uncultivated areas of the typical farm were ideal habitat for the bumblebee. However, advances in pesticides and herbicides have so reduced the incidence of crop damage and disease that a new style of agriculture, sometimes called “monoculture,” dominates farm planning and geography. The modern farm is a study in intensive land use and specialization. All lands are cultivated and, often, with a single crop. Any creeping wild brush or grass growth is eliminated, quickly and thoroughly, with extremely effective herbicides. Chemical soil fertilization is just as effective and has made crop rotation a thing of the past. The result is a modern farm with no place for bumbles. Beyond our farms, today’s increasingly urban world is also working to eliminate unsightly brush and unmown lands. Even road embankments and open park areas are regularly mowed. This creates a more pleasing cosmetic effect, but at the expense of bumblebee habitat. In notable contrast, the bumble’s habitat remains relatively intact in the less farm-friendly mountainous areas of the Western United States and Canada. And it is in just these areas, less touched by modern farming or systematic public landscaping, that bumble populations remain strong. At least one organization, the Xerces Society, named for the extinct California butterfly, Xerces Blue, is currently working to advance conservation of bumblebee habitat. The society focuses on several conservation issues including the preservation of native pollinators. In 2010, the society’s scientists developed a bee-friendly conservation strategy, the Yolo Natural Heritage Program, operated in Yolo County California. Alas, there have only been a few sightings, but let’s all keep our fingers crossed for the bumblebee’s return. 25 July 2013
Scientists at Harvard are working on the development the first robotic bee. They hope that their robo-bee will, someday, be able to pollinate flowers and crops just like the organic original: the honeybee. Beginning in 2009, Harvard’s “Micro Air Vehicles Project” has used titanium and plastic to replicate the functions, if not the appearance, of the familiar honeybee. The robo-bee pops up, complete with wings, from a quarter-sized metal disk. The the creators hope that, one day, “robo-bees” will be engineered to fly in swarms, live in artificial hives, and coordinate both their target locations and pollination methodologies. In fact, the researcher’s vision of the future “robo-bee” is so striking that one writer expressed the wish that the project’s spokesperson add the phrase “for the good of all mankind” to each progress report. Without it, readers might be reminded of all the movies “about technology that eventually destroys mankind.” In fact, the robo-bee may help save us or, at least, save our food supply. Bees have been dropping like (the proverbial) flies for over 7 years now. The current bee depopulation was termed a “disappearance,” then, a “die-off” and, now, is formally referred to as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The decline in bee populations continues at an alarming rate. However, bee die-offs are not just a part of modern life. There have been a number of die-offs in that last couple of centuries. The original European honeybee disappeared from Europe long ago. Its successor, our modern honeybee, was imported from Turkey into Europe and, then, into the United States. Bees get a lot of scientific attention because they are vital to American agriculture, which is vital to the American economy. Without bees, production of some of our most profitable crops would be impossible. Every few weeks, a news article announces the discovery of “the cause” of the threatened bee “extinction.” Blaming pesticides is almost fashionable. However, these sensational claims do little more than draw attention to particular studies, and the involved researchers. In fact, there probably isn’t a single cause. The current die-off seems to be the result of several factors working together. Sadly, our familiar honeybee may be gone long before the exact combination of factors can be found. The puzzle goes like this. A bee (1) has a parasite like varroa mites; (2) is exhausted by transport over long distances; and (3) is exposed to a particular pesticide. Alone, none of these factors would kill a bee. Even all of these put together wouldn’t kill a bee. However, all of these put together might weaken the bee’s immune system. Then, with a compromised immune system, the bee contracts, and dies from, a completely unrelated disease. That disease is the final cause the bee’s death. However, the underlying cause is an immune system compromised, not by one factor, but by a particular combination of several factors. For now, that combination remains a mystery. While science fiction films have portrayed the replacement of human beings with robots, films have never explored the possibly sinister side of robo-bee. Imagine a robotic “Stepford Bee” hiding quietly in the wings waiting for death of the last honeybee. And, then, a “brave new” technological world–without any bees at all! There is something a bit creepy about human-engineered bees pollinating crops grown from human-engineered seeds. One writer described the disturbing vision as “swarms of tiny robot bees . . . pollinating those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.” By the way, one developer of those “GMO cash crops,” Monsanto, sponsored a recent “Bee Health Summit” in Saint Louis, Missouri. A company spokesperson acknowledged that the beekeepers might have heard some “scary stuff” about Monsanto. The summit is the company’s effort to “introduce itself to the beekeeping industry” and “raise their comfort level.” And there was some discomfort with one beekeeping guest commenting, “I can’t believe I’m at Monsanto.” On the comforting side, Monsanto is after one of the oldest and most clearly identified factors in declining bee health, the parasitic varroa mite, which spreads a variety of viruses to honeybees. Researchers with Beeologics, one of Monsanto’s recent acquisitions, are planning to use RNA, a genetic regulator that determines how a plant or insect “works.” The RNA would be fed to the bee and, then, would be ingested by the mites. Once in the mite’s system, the RNA would “turn off” the mite’s virus transmitting gene. With this RNA intervention, and other technologies, our honeybees may yet be saved from relative extinction. Then, their robotic replacements would have to remain on the shelf. But hold on. Genetically engineering the mite is only one step closer to genetically engineering the honey bee. So, we may be saved from robotic bees by . . . GMO bees? Well, as our GMO bees pollinate our GMO crops, we can only feel a pang of sorrow for our robo-bee languishing in the shadows. With a revived, genetically engineered super-honeybee, where could a robotic bee go? What would it do? No problem. Harvard’s Micro Air Vehicles Project had that covered from the beginning. The project’s published reports also suggest potential military uses. So, robo-bee, with some market repositioning, becomes the world’s smallest drone. Well, if Monsanto “saves” the honeybee, who will be interested in our newly re-branded and repositioned mini-drones? Again, possibly Monsanto, which, at least once in the past, retained a private security contractor “to protect its GMO crops.” The “protection” was less exciting than it sounds. It was limited to the simple monitoring of public information. Still, what security company couldn’t use swarms of surveillance mini-drones? So, if Monsanto needs security in the future, robo-bee might play a part in the security provider’s services. Finally, we end up with yet another, unexpected vision of our future. Just picture it. We stand watching the setting sun as swarms of genetically engineered super-bees pollinate “dystopian fields of GMO cash crops,” while we, ourselves, are closely surveilled by swarms of robo-bees or, rather, “mini-drones.” Why does everything just keep getting weirder? The End? [Author’s Note: Actually, Robo-Bee is a long, long way from rolling off the assembly line and into the fields. Even farther away are the technologies and knowledge necessary to genetically engineer anything as complicated as an insect.] 13 March 2014
Researchers are asking a lot of questions about animals lately. Are animals self-aware? Do they think? And these questions are reaching beyond animals to insects as well. Do bees have personalities? And, now, do bees have feelings? It’s no surprise that this type of research tends to raise more questions than it answers. Tests seem to show that bumblebees have no individual personality. But even if bumblebees are conformists to a fault, could honeybees be non-conformists? And, even if honeybees don’t have individual personalities, could hives or even swarms of bees have distinct personalities? The idea of a group of bees having a personality seems “way out there” until you find out that beekeepers have always reported that, as a group, the bees of different hives, in many ways, behave quite differently from the bees of neighboring hives. But the question of bees having feelings seems like a tough one to test. However, finding out whether or not bees become moody may not be as tough as we thought. It turns out that when human beings and animals are in bad moods, they tend to make negative judgments. In other words, we’re all a bit pessimistic when we’re in a bad mood. But let’s begin at the beginning. One characteristic of feelings is that they change. If a person or animal always feels exactly the same way, they can’t really be said to have feelings. Now, let’s substitute the word “mood” for feeling. Why? Moods, by definition, change. So, the word “mood” is a little more precise than the word “feeling.” Now, how can you tell if an insect has moods? Maybe, by using the same test that is used with animals. The trick of the test involves negative judgments. Human beings and animals evaluate and react to situations differently when we’re in a good mood than when we’re in a bad mood. A good example is a decision based even odds – a coin toss. Would you bet on a toss of a coin? Your odds are exactly as good as they are bad. I’ll guess that if you’re asked to bet money, but trying to be frugal, going through hard times, and are a bit short of cash, you’ll pass on the bet. On the other hand, if you’ve got plenty of money and have just had a few really good breaks, you might just take the bet. Why? Your mood. You’re feeling lucky. So, for our test, we need four things. First, we need to find the equivalent of a coin toss for bees. Second, we have to offer the bet to the bees and see how many take the bet and how many refuse the bet. Third, we have to find a way to change the bees’ moods. And fourth, we have to offer those same bees the same bet, again, and see if their changed moods affects their willingness to take a chance.. As tough as all this sounds, Geraldine Wright and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the UK found a way. Bees have an excellent sense of smell and are quickly and easily trained to associate particular smells with particular things. Wright’s team, headed by Melissa Bateson, first, found something honeybees love, surcose (sugar), and something bees hate, quinine. Then, they found two substances with very different smells, octanone and hexanol. The octanone was paired with the much loved sugar and the hexanol with the hated quinine. The bees were trained to associate the smells with the substances that they loved and hated. Then, the researchers combined the chemical smells. When the well-trained bees were exposed to a combination of half octnone (lovable sugar) and half hexanol (hated quinine) half the bees “took a chance” and tasted what they hoped was sugar. The other half passed, not willing to risk licking the hated quinine. The researchers had their “coin toss” – a choice with even odds. Now, that the bees’ reaction to the half and half solution was known, the next trick was to put the same bees in a bad mood. This isn’t as hard as it sounds because there are different types of bad moods. It wasn’t necessary to depress the bees by having them watch a sad movie. Substantial stress will produce a bad mood more surely than anything else. Labs have chemical mixers mounted to benches. These mixers are machines that violently vibrate/shake containers to mix their contents. With the menacing name, vortexer, I get the impression that these machines are a bit like paint mixing machines at the local hardware store. Few could disagree that shaking a group of bees in a container in one of those mixers would leave the insects quite “stressed” – a very bad mood. After a stay in the mixer, the bees were presented with the half and half solution again. Many more bees passed on the “chance” for sugar than had before. So, changing the bee’s mood, changed their “feelings” about taking a 50/50 chance to get some food. After the “mixing,” the bee’s weren’t so anxious to take the risk. This seems to indicate that bees have moods – feelings. Of course, there are a lot of questions about the reliability of the results. Could the apparent “mood” be an automatic response based on hormonal changes or hard-wired neurological reactions? These researchers, however, expressed cautious confidence in their results. Also, the researchers made a surprisingly compelling argument that much of the doubt about the “feelings” of bees may be the result of a subtle prejudice. The researchers pointed out that if, instead of bees, the subjects of the experiment had been dogs, cats, horses, parrots, cows, or pigs, the conclusion that the experimental subjects had feelings would have gone unquestioned. Why? Well, when testing animals with which human beings have had a close historical relationship, not only are results indicating emotion and intelligence readily accepted, but researchers are willing to make far reaching assumptions based on little more than their personal instincts about particular behaviors. Jason Castro in his excellent article, Do Bees Have Feelings, refers to this argument as a plea for consistency. We often ascribe emotions to dogs, such as happiness, fear, or anxiety with little, or only intuitive, “evidence.” However, even strong evidence indicating that an insect has feelings is met with hairsplitting reservations. The conventional wisdom has always been expressed as follows: Unless we discover a way to speak directly with animals, we can never be sure if animals experience emotions in the way that human beings do. However, whether I am in a good mood or a bad mood, I’m less pessimistic about finding the answer to the question of animal and, even, insect emotion. I think that there is a preponderance of evidence sufficient to accept the hypothesis that certain animals experience certain emotions. And, although more research is needed, these first tests, alone, strongly argue that insects, honeybees, experience moods. 13 March 2014
In an effort to maintain the population of bees and other pollinators, the United States Department of Agriculture has budgeted $3 million. Most of the money will go to ranchers, farmers and beekeepers in a conservation effort to preserve and expand pollinator habitat. WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THE BEES? Bee populations have been declining for over 7 years now. First, termed a “disappearance,” then, a “die-off.” the continuing depopulation is, now, formally referred to as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” The continuing decline has been both rapid and widespread affecting perhaps the entire world. Bees get a lot of scientific attention because they are vital to American agriculture, which is vital to the American economy. Without bees, production of some of our most profitable crops would be impossible. Every few weeks, a news article announces the discovery of “the cause” of the threatened bee “extinction.” In fact, there probably isn’t a single cause. The current die-off seems to be the result of several factors working together. The puzzle goes like this. A bee (1) has a parasite like varroa mites; (2) is exhausted by transport over long distances; and (3) is exposed to a particular pesticide. Alone, none of these factors would kill a bee. Even all of these put together wouldn’t kill a bee. However, all of these put together might weaken the bee’s immune system. Then, with a compromised immune system, the bee contracts, and dies from, a completely unrelated disease. That disease is the final cause the bee’s death. However, the underlying cause is an immune system compromised, not by one factor, but by a particular combination of several factors. For now, that combination remains a mystery. A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE Modern agriculture has come to be dominated by a particular style called monoculture. The modern farm is a study in intensive land use with about every square foot of available soil used for the continuous cultivation of crops – or more precisely a signal crop. This modern style has little in common with the traditional agriculture of even a generation ago. In the past, the typical farm included a fair number of fallow (unplanted) tracts of land in which wild brush and unmown grass were allowed to grow. These tracts served several purposes. They provided “breaks,” uncultivated buffer areas between cultivated fields of crops. First, breaks slowed or prevented the spread of disease from field to field. And, second, breaks prevented the seeds of one kind of crop from creeping into fields planted with another. The third purpose of keeping some land fallow (unused) was to prevent soil depletion. The practice of letting some fields "rest" for an a season was called crop rotation, which helped prevent a loss of, or restore, fertility to tracts of land. Traditional agriculture had always avoided modern monoculture’s practice of planting only one kind of crop. The traditional reason for planting several different kinds of crops was, again, a sort of insurance against the spread of disease. While one kind of crop might fall victim to disease, another would be less susceptible and survive to produce a much-needed yield at harvest. What happened to traditional agriculture? Advances in chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides have dramatically reduced the need for crop rotation and fallow tracks of land as buffers. But this created another problem. The modern farm needs bees just as much as the traditional farm it replaced. And bees need habitat. DO BEES NEED HABITAT? When we think of bees, we tend to think of the hive-dwelling honeybee. The honeybee seemed to fit in perfectly with modern monoculture. Like everything else needed by the modern industrial farm, when you need bees, you just order them “brought in.” Beekeepers truck bees, sometimes hundreds of miles, to various locations during pollination season. Then, the bees are trucked out when pollination is over. At least, that was the plan before CCD and honeybee depopulation became a reality. But, with or without depopulation, what’s with “habitat?” The only thing honeybees need is a hive, a beekeeper, and the beekeeper’s truck. Right? Well, not quite. Honeybees aren’t the only pollinators. Worse, honeybees can’t pollinate some cash crops including certain varieties of tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums. For these crops you need bumblebees. So, why not truck-in some bumblebee hives? And there’s the problem. Bumblebees don’t live in hives. The plump bumblebee is the nearest thing to a loner within its social species. Bumblebees don’t build permanent hives. They build nests that are deserted for a new location on a yearly basis. The bumblebees don’t forage (search for and find food) in swarms, but wander alone from flower to flower in open grasslands. On the traditional farm, these wild bees made their nests in fallow tracks of grass lands or break areas between cultivated fields. Because the bumblebee’s service as a pollinator is only needed seasonally, these bees survived during the rest of the year by foraging in the same wild grasslands in which they built their nests. THE HABITAT VANISHES Monoculture changed all that. Fallow tracts, breaks, and buffers vanished with every yard of available soil planted with a crop. Even the small islands of wild grass along the farms paths and roadways were pressed into service. And the bumblebees left. What did we lose? A lot. The bumble’s unique style of pollination is required, and accounts, for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year. Fresh off the farm, the bumblebee made its way to the city or, at least, to more populated areas to find the welcome mat missing. Modern urban and highway landscaping favors a neatly manicured look that requires the elimination of the wild grasslands required by the bumblebee’s lifestyle. In parks and even around highway overpasses, that great enemy of bumblebee habitat, the lawn mower, doesn’t destroy the grass, but prevents the appearance the blooms and blossoms on which the bumblebees depend for food. And worse, the lawn mower is the arch-enemy of bumblebee nests. When the habitat vanished, so did the bumblebee. Beginning in the late 1990’s, these bees all but disappeared from a vast area of their range extending from the Pacific Coast of California north into British Columbia. Only recently have there been sightings of even a single bumblebee in several states that once supported an enormous population. THE MOUNTAIN BEE? It is said that those who felt uncomfortable in "civilization" used to become trappers and wander into the mountains -- earning the name “mountain men.” Well, maybe bumblebees did the same. As these bees almost completely disappeared from their lowland range, their numbers were, and are, unaffected in the North American Rockies where they continue to live and thrive. Mountains are not favored for agriculture and the rough beauty of mountainous areas is only enhanced by wild growing grasslands. The mountain habitat is well within the bumblebees comfort zone. THE USDA & A CHANGE IN ARGI’S “CULTURE”? With all the developments in the efficiency of modern agriculture, it is a little surprising to read of a USDA spokesman discussing the use of cover crops, rangeland, pasture management and other practices that dropped out of modern agriculture decades ago. But the purpose behind the reintroduction of crop rotation, breaks, and buffers makes sense if the purpose is to preserve native pollinators, most prominently the often forgotten bumblebee. Without effective pollinators, there will be no harvest in spite of the most intensive and efficient use of the available land. The USDA spokesman explained that these “new” practices “are expected to provide quality forage and habitat for honey bees and other pollinators, as well as habitat for other wildlife.” 13 February 2014
Nature seems like magic. For centuries we’ve marveled at natural mysteries. How did the ants communicate and maintain their coordinated and orderly activities with such amazing precision? And how did bees communicate with each other? How did they identify different types of flowers? Then, how did they select the flowers with honey? It all seemed like magic. But, so does a stage magician’s mind-reading act. The magician’s assistant mingles with members of the audience who tell the assistant secrets or show the assistant secret objects. Though too far away to see or hear the secret, the magician knows instantly. It seems like magic, but it isn’t. The magician’s assistant is wired for sound – “wearing a wire." Now, researchers suggest that honeybees, among themselves, and together with the assistance and support of the flowers, have been fooling us for thousands of years. They fooled us into believing that they had some kind of magical instinct. But, all along, they’ve been “wearing a wire.” Well, at least, we’ve learned this much. Honeybees generate and pick up an electrical charge when they fly. The charge is so strong that the honeybee emits an electrical field. The bee’s chief form communication is the waggle dance. The waggle dancing bee informs its audience that it has found a rich area full of flowers loaded with honey. The bee’s dance is intended to inform (and persuade) the rest of the bees in the hive. At least that’s what we always thought was going on. But, now, researchers have discovered that the dancing bee emits an electric field. That field is so strong that it has been known to move the antenna of the bees “in the audience.” The dancing bee’s electrical field becomes even stronger when combined with sound – a sound like buzzing. All this time, scientists have been carefully observing the waggle dancers “steps” (choreography), while the dancing bee may just be talking to the audience electrically — sort of like the bee version of a walkie-talkie. Maybe, bees don’t even need to waggle dance when they “talk.” Maybe, they just like to waggle when they talk -- on what must be the bee version of a cell phone. As if that wasn’t enough of a “buzz-kill,” at least for those of us who used to be wrapped up in the magic and mystery of bee communication, it turns out that flowers are in on the “act” as well. Researchers at the University of Bristol discovered that, like bees, flowers also have electrical fields. And guess what. The flowers’ electrical fields seem to communicate with bumblebees. Like some transportation and reconnaissance computers, a flower’s electrical field seems to tell the bee everything – flower type, volume of pollen, time of last bee visit, etc. It’s sort of like a modern air traffic control computer. It does everything for the operator. No wonder bees are so well organized, what else do they have to do? It may turn out that the bee’s elaborate dance and the flowers’ colors, shapes, and odor, are just be so much “smoke and mirrors” to conceal nature’s equivalent of an “on board computer” handling everything. 13 February 2014
Bees? Are they dancing or are they talking? Are they talking or are they dancing? But wait! They’re doing both! . . . at the same time! It’s called the waggle dance. It’s, at least, one of the ways bees talk to each other. What is the dance like? Well, it involves waggling. And, before the dance was understood to be a kind of language, at least one person who saw it, Nicholas Unhoch, thought the bees’ danced just for a good time — enjoying “jollity.” Then, Karl von Frisch got the idea that the bees were talking with the waggle dance. He was a patient man. He spent years observing and cataloging the “language” of the dance. The dance is called a “recruitment” dance because the dancing bee is trying to get other bees in the hive to travel to a particular location at which, the waggle-dancer promises, the bees will be rewarded with loads of honey. The dance language goes like this. Imagine one of those old dance-step charts, showing footprints, which would be put on the floor to train would-be dancers. The bee-version would be tacked up on the wall of the hive — actually, attached to the front of the honeycomb. With bees, dancing is more of an “up and down” affair – unlike the human “back and forth” dance movement. On the chart, you’ll see one straight line up the center; then, two lines curve out to the right and left at the top and, then, bending down and back inward to reconnect to the bottom of the straight center line. The bee dancer may follow this circuit more than 100 times. The dancing bee follows that straight center line upward from the bottom to the top waggling all the way. This is called the waggle phase. Then, when the waggle-dancer reaches the top of the straight center line, it stops waggling and goes to the right and back down to the bottom of the center line. Then, it waggles its way back up to the top and, turning left this time, stops waggling as it goes back down to the bottom and repeats its climb to the top waggling all the way. The Waggle Dance But what does the dance say? Well, first, it’s about direction. If the bee waggle-dances absolutely straight up from bottom to top, before turning left or right, it means that, when the recruited bees leave the hive, they will find the honey by going in the exact direction of the sun in the sky. If the “waggler” dances upward at even the slightest angle to the right side or the left, that is the exact angle to the right or left of the sun in the sky that the other bees must fly to find the honey. Not only are waggle-dancing bees really good with angles, but these bees know how the sun moves. Even if the bees linger in the hive for a long time after seeing the dance, it won’t throw the waggle dance directions off a bit. The bees will compensate for the sun’s change of position by making the precise corrective adjustment necessary to locate and, then, follow the correct direction. But knowing the direction of the honey is only half of what the recruited bees need to know. To find the honey, they also need to know how far they’ll have to travel in that direction.. The distance is just as precisely communicated by the waggle-dancer but, now, with the timing of the waggling performance. The longer the waggle-dancer takes to dance up the straight path from bottom to top, the farther away the honey will be found. There are many small variations in the waggle dancer’s moves and each one means something. But the dancer isn’t a commander, but a recruiter. So, the message in the waggle dance isn’t a command. The waggler is just “selling” it’s find of honey to the other bees in the hive. But if this is salesmanship, do the bees in the hive ever “pass” on whatever the waggle- dancer is “pitching?” Yes, just because a bee waggles doesn’t mean that the other bees must follow. The first and greatest challenge is competition. When I first heard this description of what happens in the hive, it reminded me of a row of pitchmen at a circus or fair. There may be several, or something like a row of, bees each doing its own waggle dance, at the same time. Each hoping to recruit it’s fellows to the hoard of honey that particular dancer has discovered. As long as were discussing sales, you might wonder if there’s an art to sales even among bees. Do some pitches work better than others? Do some wagglers not just offer the steak, but “sell the sizzle? (Better: Do some bees not just offer the honey, but sell the sweetness?) But, even with bees, enthusiasm sells. The more excited the bee is about the honey source, the more rapidly it will waggle, communicating its excitement about its find to the recruit-able bees in the audience. Somehow, I can’t help imagining that I’ve seen this excited waggle in other . . . creatures. When my dog hears the jangle of its leash, he runs back and forth between where I’m standing and the door, excited to be going outside. I think I’ve seen him definitely waggling. But back to bees. There are “Do Bees” and “Don’t Bees.” Bad behavior isn’t restricted to humans. Overly enthusiastic waggling bees occasionally get out hand when it comes to sales. When competing with their fellow wagglers, the dancers will, sometimes, disrupt their competitor’s dance. Their competitor, in turn, will fight off the disruptor. I can imagine the whole hive dissolving into the bee version of a barroom brawl. But what about the potential recruits? Do they watch dutifully to determine the best source and carefully note the direction and distance to the honey. Surprising, like children in school, a few do, but most don’t. Whether day-dreaming or quietly buzzing with their friends about hive gossip, many miss the waggle message completely. Then, what happens when these inattentive bees are jostled from their distraction by the need to search for honey? Well, they may lag, just a little, until the swarm forms. When it takes off to find the next meal, these less informed bees will just follow along behind the swarm to find the honey. What happens if a bee lags even longer and misses the direction of the departing swarm? Not to worry. Some bees just fly out of the hive and look around on their own hoping to catch a lucky break and find some honey by chance. In spite of the “Don’t Bee” slackers, the waggle dance is important to the survival of hives when honey is hard to find. When supplies are short, the scouts who come back to the hive to waggle-dance are the chief sources of information about honey location and, often, the only available sources of honey for the hive. Only in good times can some bees slack off and others go their own way when gathering honey. After the swarm follows the waggler and gathers a lot of honey, the bees will return to the hive loaded down. Then, the returning bees pass their honey to receiver bees. The receivers, in turn, seal the honey in the comb for storage. But what happens if a swarm comes back loaded with honey to find all the rest of the bees are leaving to gather yet more honey, themselves? Well, the load-carrying bees have to stop the departing bees from leaving because they are needed as “receivers.” How do the loaded bees get the message across? Another dance. The “tremble dance” is used to recruit receiver bees for unloading and storing the honey brought back to the hive by bees carrying a full load. And there are more dances. If a bee gets infested with mites, or just covered with dust, it can do the “grooming dance.” That dance recruits other bees to help the mite-infested or dusty bee get rid of its mites or clean itself up. 13 February 2014
The fate of bees, generally, is a matter of great concern these days. Bee populations throughout the world, and particularly in the United States and Europe, are dropping rapidly and mysteriously. Without the bees’ unique service as pollinators, the value of yearly agriculture output would drop by billions of dollars. Without bees, our food supply would plummet and a good portion of the people on earth would begin to starve – quickly. The problem has a name CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, but no one is sure what it is. The best guess is that bees are weakened by a variety of factors until their immune systems collapse. Then, they contract, and are killed, by an unrelated disease, leaving researchers to trace back through the maze to the root cause or causes. But let’s look at the world from the bee’s perspective. What is it like to live a bee’s life? Right now, a terrible plague, CCD, is hanging over bee populations all over the world. And what would the surviving bees say, if asked about their daily life? Well, I think it would go something like this. Interviewer: What is it like to work as a pollinator, Ms. Bee? Bee: Work! We aren’t worker-bees anymore! We’re slaves being worked to death. Interviewer: I don’t understand. Don’t you live out in nature. Living and working as you have for thousands of years? Bee: Natural bee’s life! Not even close! First, we’re fed chemicals to make us more active during pollination season. It’s like the stuff they give to athletes before competition. We don’t recover until about 3 months after the pollination season is over. And, during pollination season, we’re trucked hundreds of miles on bumpy roads 24-hours a day so we can’t sleep. And we don’t get any food. They’re afraid we won’t be aggressive enough pollinators unless were starving. Interviewer: Yes, but when you get to the fields, you get to chow down . . . ? Bee: What?! They release twice as many bees into those fields as are needed to pollinate the available blossoms. That’s so they can make sure every blossom gets pollinated. So, most of us get hardly anything to eat. And, we were starving already. Interviewer: But, then, they feed you. Bee: No. Then, they starve us for another day -- so we'll be “aggressive” about gathering honey. Remember? No wonder we’re dropping like flies. Like I said, it takes months for us to recover after the big pollination season. The only time we get to eat is when we’re resting off-season. After a few years of this . . . Let’s just say I wouldn’t cry if I never saw a blossom again. [Nervously, the interviewer pauses – afraid to bring up the next subject.] Interviewer: [cautiously] I want to ask you about . . . pesticides. Bee: Pesticides! Don’t even get me started about pesticides! A bee’s life? If I had these working conditions, I’d look for a new career. I’m sure many honeybees fall victim to CCD yearly. But the more I hear about the honeybees' life in the hive, the more I wonder if some are sneaking away to alternative careers to escape the sweatshop conditions of employment as a “pollinator.” Honeybee’s have something going for them. After thousands of years of smelling flowers, they’ve got good noses . . . . TRAIN FAST FOR A NEW CAREER IN HEALTHCARE: DIAGONOTICS. [image] I can imagine honeybees buzzing around windows and ducking into homes and libraries to catch a look at the internet hoping to see one of those ads, “A Career in Health Care – Train in less than . . . 10 minutes?!” Yes, learn advanced medical diagnostics, for bees, in less than 10 minutes. What can you expect to learn to diagnose? Tuberculosis, lung, skin and pancreatic cancer. However, there is one catch. You must be a honeybee, Apis mellifera! Other species need not apply. What’s so special about these bees? They have an unbelievably acute sense of smell. They can detect airborne molecules in the parts-per-trillion range. What does that mean? Well, let’s just say this puts “sniffer dogs” to shame. But what does smell have to do with diagnosing diseases? Do people with certain diseases smell? No! But their breath carries an odor that indicates the presence of certain diseases. Technically called “biomarkers” these chemical odors are associated with specific diseases. Odors that honeybees can detect. A bee might ask, “What sort of working conditions?” The bees work in a glass structure designed by Susana Soares of Portugal. When the patient exhales into that same glass structure, the bees must fly into a smaller chamber (within the larger glass chamber) if they smell disease. [image] The next question the bee might ask, “What about the training?” The training takes about 10 minutes. The bees are exposed to a biomarker odor associated with a particular disease. With each exposure they are fed a solution of water and sugar until they associate the odor with the reward. “Reward, huh?” muses the honeybee applicant. “What sort of benefits can I expect?” “Are these job secure?” The answer. The 10 minute training will last for life. Of course, your employer has to keep your skills sharp by rewarding you with water and sugar repeatedly. “So,” the bee muses, “I only have to train once, and I’ll get rewarded almost constantly with water and sugar?” “Sweet!” And everyone’s wondering why bees leave their hives and don’t come back. [video] Honey bees can be trained to detect cancer "in ten minutes" TRAIN FOR A CAREER IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: THE WAR ON DRUGS The DEA may be planning to use bees for security-related activities. “Security-related activities?” Yes, bees may be rapidly replacing those clumsy flea-bitten beasts on four legs — drug-sniffing dogs. Remember a bee’s nose put’s the canine sniffer to shame. A small hive of honeybees is easier to carry and care for than those hounds with their endless vaccinations, flea powder, and licensing requirements. What working conditions can the bees expect? The same cushy conditions as those in medical diagnostics: Job security with constant rewards in the form of food – water and sugar. But, instead of a glass jar, these bees work in a box. What do they do in the box. The same thing they did in the jar. It’s all about the bee’s amazing sense of smell. Again, remember those noses. The bees don’t even have to leave home, but live in a mobile home or, rather, a box. When air is blown through their “buzz box,” their responsive behavior alerts officers to the presence of drugs. The box works on the same principle as the glass jar in medical diagnostics. The bees are trained to recognize the smell of a particular drug through rewards. When the air blows through the box, if the smell of contraband is detected, the bees react. But the buzz box is an especially easy gig – the bees don’t even have to fly. All they have to do is stick their tongues out. The users will recognize this, not as a sign of disrespect, but as preparation for meal as the bees associate the smell of drugs with a reward. As far back as 2006, researchers at the Rothamsted Research Centre in Hertfordshire, UK were testing the first prototype of the buzz box. It is being manufactured and marketed by Inscentinel a related company. Inscentinel’s General Manager, Rachael Carson, says that this technology could be used to detect more than drugs and might even be used to monitor food quality. Rothamsted Research Centre Inscentinel But with research also emphasizing security-related applications, such as the detection of TNT, Semtex, gunpowder and other explosives, another related career will soon be open to our job-seeking honeybees. SNIFFER BEES NEW FLYING SQUAD IN WAR AGAINST TERROR TRAIN FOR A CAREER IN COUNTER TERRORISM Remember the sign that used to say, “We’re looking for a few good dogs.” Well, the word “dogs” has been crossed out and “bees” written-in above it. The same buzz box in which bees detect the scent of drugs, works just as well with the scent of explosives. This opens a wide range of civilian and military careers to our career-switching bees. The “B Teams” (bee teams) in the buzz boxes are building an impressive test record detecting explosives hidden in shipments passing through busy cargo airports. The big losers here are the "former drug-sniffing” dogs. There may be a canine unemployment issue as man’s best friend starts pounding the pavement looking for work after losing out to the new, cheaper, and less care-intensive honeybee. A FEW GOOD BEES NEEDED FOR HUMANITARIAN DEMINING. American researchers have, and are, experimented with mine-searching bees as part of combat landmine clearance. However, landmines can remain hidden in the ground long after hostilities have ended. During the peace, after war, the job of finding and removing “abandoned” landmines is called “humanitarian demining.” HUMANITARIAN DEMINING [image] Croatian researchers heard about the honeybee’s amazing nose and are, now, training bees to find unexploded landmines. About 750 square kilometers (466 square miles) of Croatia and the Balkans may still be filled with mines from the Balkan wars in the 1990’s. Nikola Kezic, a professor at Zagreb University and an expert on the behavior of honeybees, has proposed an experiment: Bees have an almost perfect sense of smell – one that can quickly detect the scent of explosives. Can the insect be trained through food rewards to detect the smell of TNT? TNT is the most frequent explosive used in the landmines. The problem is that the smell of TNT evaporates very quickly. Too quickly for dogs or rats to detect. (Yes, rats have been used in landmine detection.) However, neither of these animals have a nose anywhere near as sensitive as that of the honeybee. For these experiments, the bees will be trained by mixing a small quantity of TNT in with food -- water and sugar. After the bees learn to associate the smell of TNT with food, they will be released into a field in which small quantities of TNT have been placed in various locations. If they can locate the TNT in the field, the bees should be able to smell the traces of TNT from a buried land mine. The Croatian researchers are optimistic about the early test results. And speaking of “humanitarian” applications, let’s not forget the welfare or our dogs (and, apparently, even our rats). This is one career that the dogs and rats will be happy to leave behind. Although dogs can, sometimes, sniff out land mines they are rather heavy animals. Weight on the surface of the ground -- above a landmine -- doesn’t promise anything good for the locating canine. If a particular dog is successful in locating landmines, it tends to enjoy a very short career. In contrast the bees remain airborne, and can not only detect TNT, but live to sniff another day. HONEYBEES TRAINED IN CROATIA TO FIND LAND MINES At least one bee researcher expressed dismay with all of these new careers for the honeybee. The fear is that putting honeybees in these unfamiliar boxes and jars could cause stress that would affect the insect’s performance. However, when you review the “unnatural” life of the modern "pollinating" honeybee, nothing about any of these new careers could be remotely stressful. So far, the bees seem to thoroughly enjoy the light work schedule and frequent rewards. I wouldn’t be surprised if, someday soon, the almond orchards of California will have a serious honeybee shortage. CCD? Sure. Bees are dying in record numbers. But, just maybe, more than a few are escaping to alternative careers with comfortable working conditions, generous benefits, and long term security. Maybe even bees know a “better deal” when they find it . . . or smell it. 16 January 2014
Could bees be more intelligent than we think? We’ve been hearing about a lot discoveries in the area of animal intelligence. It’s one thing to speculate about the intelligence of birds and even octopuses, but insects? Well, at least one group of scientists has tried to “look into” the question. I say “look into” because, with insects, it’s difficult to come up with anything even remotely resembling a standardized test. So, the researchers began by biting off a piece that scientific testing “could chew”: Do bees have individual personalities? A research team at the Queen Mary University of London designed an experiment in which they observed the foraging preferences of bumblebees. However, the experiment was not designed to test the general foraging preferences of the bees, as a group, but the individual preferences of the individual bees. In other words, let’s look past the swarm and ask: what’s on the mind of the lone bee in the crowd? The team of researchers, Helene Muller, Heiko Grossmann, and Lars Chittka, released bumblebees into an enclosed space with artificial flowers of different colors. The idea was to see if individual bees had their own individual favorite colors. Do some bees prefer one color while some of their peers prefer other colors? The researchers measured how quickly individual bees approached flowers of a certain color, and how long individual bees stayed at flowers of a certain color. In a paper published in Animal Behavior, the team reported finding no difference among the individual bees’ observed “preferences.” The result suggests that bumblebees do not have individual personalities. Of course, this doesn’t end the investigation. There may be future studies with other tests based on other criteria. But, for now, if you’re in advertising and bumblebees compose your target market, it makes no difference what colors your product comes in. One interesting aspect of the experiment or, perhaps, interesting aspect of bee species, themselves, is the difference between the hive-less loner — the bumblebee – and its more social cousin — the honeybee. All bees are social, but bumblebees live in relatively small groups in nests that are abandoned and rebuilt on a yearly basis. These bees tend to forage for food alone. In contrast, honeybees live in densely populated hives, which will remain their home from birth to death. Honeybees travel and forage for food in swarms. What difference does sociability make? Well, maybe none. However, the development of human intelligence has long been attributed to the necessity for social interaction. In other words, because humans developed social groups in order to survive, they were compelled to develop intelligence in order to interact with other members of the group. If the relationship between intelligence and social interaction were the rule, the bumblebee subjects of this latest study would be the “less intelligent” species when compared to their more social cousins, the honeybees. So, maybe the colored flower test should be performed on the honeybees because these bees are more social. That means they must be more intelligent. Right? Well, maybe it’s not that simple. Perhaps, human intelligence did develop in response to social interaction with the result that human researchers assume that this is the only way intelligence could develop. The social interaction “rule” has been seriously challenged by the high levels of intelligence displayed by one of the most unsocial animals on earth: the octopus. Octopuses have virtually no social interactions with members of their own species. These creatures, literally, meet their peers only briefly to eat them or mate with them. Both process result in the death of either one or both of the guests at the party. (With octopuses, mating is followed by the swift death of both participants.) That’s the social life of the octopus. Period. Perhaps, just because human intelligence developed out of the necessity for social interaction, human researchers have a built-in prejudice in favor of social intelligence. And, perhaps, it was just this prejudice that blinded human researchers to the clear displays of octopus intelligence – at least until relatively recently. What got the unsocial octopus noticed? Its use of tools. The octopus displays an amazing repertoire of tool selection, retention, and use and, also, displays a remarkable ingenuity in its interactions with its inanimate environment. So, social intelligence certainly isn’t the only type of intelligence. See: “THURSDAY: A Different Flavor – Just How Smart Are Octopuses?“ Given the amazing intelligence of the loner octopus, perhaps, the more intelligent bee species would be the (relatively) lone bumblebee. Forced to develop its individual initiative through ages of lone foraging, perhaps, the bumblebee has developed a resourceful intelligence. But is intelligence the same as personality? While no one knows the answer to these interesting questions, the “The Best Bees Company” added some interesting suggestions based on their own interactions with bees and bee keepers. In their experience, different hives seemed to have different “personalities.” The honeybees of one hive “hoarded” pollen – gathering and storing it in large quantities. But the bees of another hive seemed to prefer gathering and storing more honey in preference to pollen. While noting that these and other differences could be attributable to different environments, or even genetics, the authors make an interesting suggestion with a question. Could individual hives, rather than individual bees, develop personalities? As the authors put it, could there be a “personality” distinct to each hive’s “social super organism?” From yet another angle, could the “whole” be more than the sum of the “parts.” That is, could the “whole,” hives and swarms, consistently develop and display particular behavior patterns distinct from other hives and swarms. In contrast, the “parts” alone, the individual bees, display no apparent individual behaviors? See: “Individual personality in bees? Animal consciousness? Cool research.“ Well, all of these are interesting questions. Experienced observation together with the earliest research predictably seems to provide many more questions than answers. At this point, the puzzle boils down to whether or not bees (and all insects) are, intellectually, “little robots” or “thinking beings.” |