Bees — What’s with the Buzz?

10 April 2014

Ms. Bee, why do you buzz?

Reason #1: Mechanics

Bees can’t help it.  When the bee flaps its small wings with amazing speed, it creates a gust of wind.  Well, actually, it creates a lot of short, strong gusts of wind.  These small gusts are so sudden and definite, that we hear it as a buzz. Bee’s aren’t the only insect that buzzes. Flies buzz and so do many other flying insects.  But the bee takes a prize for having a particularly loud buzz.

Reason #2: Pollination

Some bees buzz even when they’re not flying. 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 the bumblebee a uniquely valuable pollinator of certain crops.

After landing on 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.

Bumbles are specially suited to pollinate a variety of cash crops including tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples, zucchinis, avocados, and plums.  Their unique style of pollination accounts for about 3 billion dollars in produce each year.

Reason #3: Electronic Communication

Third, recent speculation suggests that bees may buzz to enhance their electronic communication. Yes, electronic communication ! Honeybees communicate with each other through a variety of dances. One of the bees’ “steps” is the waggle dance. When a single bee discovers an area rich in pollen and honey, the bee returns to the hive and does the waggle dance. The bee’s dance-moves inform the other bees of the location of the blooms that will provide the most food.

We always thought it was the waggle dancer’s “moves” that did the talking.  But, now, we’re not so sure.  Researchers discovered that honeybees generate and pick up an electrical charge when they fly.  The charge is so strong that the flying honeybee produces an electrical field.  In fact, the waggle-dancing bee produces an electrical field so strong that it has been known to move the antennae of the bees “in the audience.”

What does all this have to do with buzzing?  Well, guess what makes the dancing bee’s electrical field even stronger?  Sound.  What kind of sound?  The sound of buzzing.  So, the buzz of the honeybee may be more than just the sound its wings happen to make when they flap.  That buzz may be an electronic amplifier that works like a loud speaker to broadcast its message louder and farther.

“Reason #3” was supposed to be end of the list.  But as I was writing, I carelessly imagined the sound of a swarm of bees . . . buzzing.  And, to my surprise, that sound, even in my imagination, scared me a little.  I felt a “knee-jerk” reaction.  Alarm.  I wanted to get to a safe distance – fast!   So, I’ve added another possible reason why bees buzz . . .

Reason #4: A Warning 

Could the bee’s buzz be a warning?  Does the buzz of a swarm of bees scare-off persons or animals that might, otherwise, interfere with the bees’ work gathering honey and pollen.  And when the bees are “at home,” could the sound of their buzzing also warn off potential predators or honey robbers that might disturb the bees’ hive? 

My own alarm at even the imagined sound of swarm of buzzing bees reminded me of something.   I remembered a story about a movie.

It was rumored that the sound of a swarm of agitated bees was inserted into the soundtrack of the 1973 horror film, The Exorcist.  As the story goes, to keep audience tensions high during relatively quiet scenes, director William Friedkin had Ron Nagle recorded and, then, altered the sound of a swarm of angry bees.  Finally, the sound was carefully “blended” into the film’s final soundtrack.

No one actually heard the sound of the buzzing swarm because no one was supposed to hear it. The recording of the agitated bees was intentionally introduced at a subliminal level of volume.  That is, the recording was played at a volume too low to be consciously heard.  But the volume was sufficient to allow viewers (and listeners) to unconsciously “hear” the buzzing swarm and react with their own fear and agitation.

This classic tale from film history assumes that the sound of the buzzing of a swarm of angry bees is terrifying to human beings.  So, maybe the bees’ buzz has yet another purpose:  It keeps meddlers at a distance while the bees do their work.

See: The Sound of Silence for more on the cinematic tale of the subliminal sound of “the swarm of bees.”

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

10 April 2014

About the Author

What Einstein Didn’t Say About Bees

10 April 2014

In 1994, a quote attributed to Albert Einstein appeared in popular circulation:

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live..”

Einstein didn’t say that.

If the great scientist ever said anything about bees, publicly, he was probably quoting someone else. Maybe the statement, above, was made by whoever circulated the quote in 1994 and, then, “creatively” attributed it to Einstein.  Then, again, maybe the quote had been around for a while, but came from another source – someone other than Einstein.

But, then, who said it?

The prize for the closest match from a known source goes to Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck who said in his 1901 book, “The Life of the Bee”:

“[You’ve seen the bee] to whom we probably owe most of our flowers and fruits (for it is actually estimated that more than a hundred thousand varieties of plants would disappear if the bees did not visit them), and possibly even our civilization, for in these mysteries all things intertwine.”

While not packing quite the punch of the modern (apocryphal) Einstein quote, Maeterlinck is perhaps the oldest commentator to link the disappearance of bees with a dire result for humanity.

While there’s no record of Einstein ever saying anything about bees, there is a short history of bee quotations attributed to him.

“The Canadian Bee Journal” included a bee quotation attributed to Einstein, in 1941, but no one has ever been able to actually link the quote to Einstein. Even the writer says that he or she is quoting from memory:

“Remove the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one hundred thousand plants that will not survive.”

Not until 1966, did “The Irish Beekeeper” attribute a bee quotation to Einstein that mentioned the end of humanity:

“Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared.”

But no one can find any source of, or reference to, the quotation above. “The Irish Beekeeper” attributed the quote to a 1965 issue of a French periodical, Abeilles et fleurs.   Unfortunately, despite a thorough search of that periodical’s contents, no such quote, attributed to Einstein or anyone else, could be found.

In his 1992 book, The Diversity of Life, Biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote:

“[I]f all [the bees] were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.”

But this is, certainly, Wilson’s statement and not anyone else’s.

Finally, during a 1994 demonstration by beekeepers in Brussels, members of the National Union of French Apiculture handed out pamphlets attributing the following quotation to Albert Einstein:

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”

Again, Al never said that.  And we may never know who did.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

10 April 2014

About the Author

Electric Bees

13 February 2014

Nature seems like magic.  We marvel at nature’s mysteries.  How do the ants communicate and maintain their coordinated and orderly activities?  And the honeybees?  How do bees communicate with each other?  How do they identify different types of flowers?  Then, how do they select the flowers with honey?

It all seems 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 anything, the magician seems to guess the secret or the name of the hidden object -- instantly.

It all seems like magic, but it isn’t.

The magician can actually hear the conversation between the assistant and the audience members.  How?  The assistant is wearing a hidden microphone and transmitter.  In other words, the assistant is “wired for sound” or “wearing a wire.”

Now, some research suggests that honeybees, among themselves, and together with the help and support of the flowers, have been fooling us for years.  They may have fooled us into believing that they had some kind of magical instinct.  But, all along, they’ve just been “wearing a wire.”

The bee’s chief form communication is the waggle dance.  The waggle dancing bee informs its audience if, and when, it has found a rich area full of flowers loaded with honey.  And the dance is also an effort to persuade the rest of the bees to go after the newly discovered honey.

At least that’s what we always thought was going on. 

But, now, we’ve found out something we didn’t know before.  Honeybees generate and pick up an electrical charge when they fly.  The charge is so strong that the flying honeybee is surrounded by an electrical field.  When a bee “talks” to other bees, by dancing, it can create an electrical field powerful enough to move the antenna of the other bees “in the audience.”  The dancing bee’s electrical field seems to have a stronger effect when it is combined with sound.  What sort of sound?   You guessed it.   A sound like . . . buzzing.

All this time, scientists have been carefully observing the waggle dancers’ “steps” (choreography).   But 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 is their version of an iPhone.

As if that wasn’t enough of a “buzz-kill” to the magical mystery of the honeybee’s daily activities, it turns out that the flowers are “in on the act” as well.  Researchers at the University of Bristol found that, like bees, flowers also have electrical fields.  And guess what?  The flowers’ electrical fields seem to communicate information to bumblebees.

Like an air traffic controller’s computer screen, a flower’s electrical field seems to tell the bee everything – flower type, volume of pollen, time of last bee visit, etc.  In fact, the flowers’ “transmissions” tell the bees so much, so quickly, that the bee’s daily activities are transformed from a maze of complexity into a “no-brainer.”   This may all help to explain the bee’s amazing social organization.  Since honey-gathering is so easy with all this electronic “ground support,” the bees can afford to spend their abundant spare time organizing the hive.  What else do they have to do?

So, in the end, we may find that yet another one of nature’s magical veils has fallen away.  In the past, researchers spent years studying the bees’ elaborate dance-moves and the flowers’ colors, shapes, and odor.   But the dances, decorations, and perfumes may turn out to have been just a distraction -- “smoke and mirrors” – concealing nature’s version of “on board computers” that handle everything.

Bee Buzz Creates Electric Field That Helps Insects Communicate

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

13 February 2014

About the Author

Bees Seek New Careers – Tired of Sweat-Shop Apiaries and CCD?

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 outdoors -- in nature?  Buzzing and working as you have for thousands of years?

Bee: Nature!?  Natural 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 a big 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: DIAGNOSTICS

Observation of Honeybee Behavior in Glass Structure Can Identify Diseases

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,” distinct 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.

Glass Structure Designed by Susana Soares Uses Bees to Diagnose Certain Diseases

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?”  (pause)  “Sweet!”

And everyone’s wondering why bees leave their hives and don’t come back.

Designer Trains Bees To Detect Some Cancers

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 jobs 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 DE-MINING.

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 de-mining.”

Humanitarian De-Mining

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.

Mark Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

13 February 2014

About the Author

Dance Talkin’ – How the Bees Say It

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.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

About the Author

How do the Bees Feel?

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.

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

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Bees – Little Robots or Thinking Beings?

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.  However, 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 honey bee.  All bees are social, but bumblebees live in relatively small groups in nests, which are abandoned and rebuilt in another location 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 loner 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.

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 an added 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,” a hive or swarm, consistently develop and display particular behavior patterns distinct from other hives and swarms.  In contrast, could 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 a simple question.  Are bees (and all insects) are, intellectually, “little robots” or “thinking beings?”

M Grossmann of Hazelwood, Missouri & Belleville, Illinois

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