For Our Beekeepers

[BigV]

They're smart too!

Bumblebees are nimble learners.

Perry and his colleagues wrote Thursday in the journal Science that, despite bees' miniature brains, they can solve new problems quickly just by observing a demonstration. This suggests that bees, which are important crop pollinators, could in time adapt to new food sources if their environment changed.

As we have reported on The Salt before, bee populations around the world have declined in recent years. Scientists think a changing environment is at least partly responsible.

Perry and colleagues built a platform with a porous ball sitting at the center of it. If a bee went up to the ball, it would find that it could access a reward, sugar water.

One by one, bumblebees walked onto the platform, explored a bit, and then slurped up the sugar water in the middle.

"Essentially, the first experiment was: Can bees learn to roll a ball?" says Perry.

Then, the researchers moved the ball to the edge of the platform.

"The bees came out, looked at the center, didn't have reward. They went to the ball, didn't have reward. They had to figure out that they needed to move the ball from the edge to the center, and then they'd get reward," says Perry.

The ball was a token, like the dollar bill you'd put in a vending machine. The sugar water was like a can of soda that could only be unlocked using the token.

If a bee couldn't figure out how to get the reward, a researcher would demonstrate using a puppet — a plastic bee on the end of a stick — to scoot the ball from the edge of the platform to the center.

"Bees that saw this demonstration learned very quickly how to solve the task. They started rolling the ball into the center; they got better over time," says Perry.

They learned from watching a puppet bee. Daaaang.

And some busybee-scientists are probing the bee brains.

The difficulty to simultaneously record neural activity and behavior presents a considerable limitation for studying mechanisms of insect learning and memory. The challenge is finding a model suitable for the use of behavioral paradigms under the restrained conditions necessary for neural recording. In honeybees, Pavlovian conditioning relying on the proboscis extension reflex (PER) has been used with great success to study different aspects of insect cognition. However, it is desirable to combine the advantages of the PER with a more robust model that allows simultaneous electrical or optical recording of neural activity. Here, we briefly discuss the potential use of bumblebees as models for the study of learning and memory under restrained conditions. We base our arguments on the well-known cognitive abilities of bumblebees, their social organization and phylogenetic proximity to honeybees, our recent success using Pavlovian conditioning to study learning in two bumblebee species, and on the recently demonstrated robustness of bumblebees under conditions suitable for electrophysiological recording.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I was using a small underpowered wood chipper that had an engine like a lawn mower with the fan on top pulling air in and down through the engine for cooling. Anyway, I'm making a lot of noise and chips are flying but the huge Bumble bee is nosing around at their usual pace of how the hell do they stay up. Sure enough he gets sucked into the engine and I figure he's a gonner.
It must have been at least five minutes before the engine stalled again and pretty quick he come flying out, flew in a couple circles then moseyed off.
I thought damn, he is one tough bastard, must be a Seal, or Green Beret, of the Bumblebees.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Beeeeeeeeeeeees

[xoxoxoBruce]

Cheerios ran a ad campaign offering wild flower seeds for the claimed purpose of helping save the Honeybees. We know it was a self serving ad campaign but at least it was something cool, instead of some plastic shit which would break the heart of every kid who mailed in and waited six to eight weeks.

They are promising to add 3300 acres of wild flowers to their oat farms, and set a goal of giving away 100,000,000 wild flower seeds. I don't know how many seeds in a packet so it's hard to figure how many people requested seeds.
They stopped the promotion after giving away 1.5 Billion seeds. I hope half of them get planted, and 20% of those grow.
Thanks, Cheerios.

[Griff]

That kind of advertising should be rewarded.

[nowhereman]

7 of my hives are still cruising, will probably be out flying this weekend. I'm glad that I added supplemental sugar blocks with this cold weather not giving up.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Myth: Bees make honey.

How it spread: This one spread because, well, bees do make honey.

The truth: However, only a small number of bees make beeswax hives and fill them with honey. In fact, there are only seven species of true honeybees— out of the approximately 22,000 species— on the planet. Several other species not considered true honeybees make and store honey, too, but not in the amounts that honeybees do. Some of the remaining bee species make tiny amounts of honey to feed to their young, but most make no honey at all and don’t even live in hives. (Most bees are solitary, and make nests in the ground.)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Spring...

[nowhereman]

Crazy weather here in central CT. 52F yesterday, 14F tonight. Still too cold to fill the feeders, glad I have the sugar blocks on.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Oh dear, the poor bees. They must like honey, who'd a thunk it.

[Clodfobble]

But I thought they always told us if you roll them on their side they WON'T drown in their own vomit...

[Gravdigr]

Those bees were emotional children of business school graduates, so...

[tw]

Those are the non-union bees sent to their death by an uncaring and dictatorial top management - the queen. Even bees need a union.

[Gravdigr]

[xoxoxoBruce]

If you think you're out of honey, before you run out and buy some check the cupboards, look in the fridge, scout the pantry, and don't forget to check the wall.