Part of this post is reprinted from a personal letter to Allen Dick (so
Allen you might find this boring to reread)
 
With regards to the evolution of intelligence, I do not think lacking
intelligance is anything to be looked down upon.  I feel that intelligence
is just one out of many strategies that organisms have evolved to make a
living.  There are some mighty stupid bacteria and viruses out there that
are far more successful than anything our ape line has produced.  So, it
seems to me that being intelligent is nothing to really brag about.  The
aliens who who arrive to earth might in fact find intelligence boring, and
be more interested in the bread molds than in us (especially if the aliens
were themselves bread molds).  For honey bees not to be as intelligent as us
is really no insult to them. As far as comparing them to us, granted honey
bees are fairly intelligent as far insects go, but I think our ancestry has
invested much more heavily in intelligence than bees have. Sure honey bees
have a language, but that does not mean they are intelligent.  Yeast also
use pheromones to communicate, and I don't think they are particularily
intelligent (except when they are being used to make mead :) ).  Being able
to communicate a conscious thought is another matter (and maybe bees do this
when they return from a foraging trip, but nobody knows that).
 
I do not think that honey bees live simply from reflex (they are not stupid
- although this a very value loaded word, and I give it out more from a
subjective reaction than any objective conclusion). I do believe (from what
I have read) that they have an incredible capacity to learn for a creature
with a brain the size of a grass seed ('the brain of a bee is the size of a
grass seed and is not made for thinking'- Karl von Frisch).  Nonetheless, I
think our behaviors rely a great deal more on learning and experience than
the bees do though.  Bees get around novel situations in ways other than
learning.  Flexible division of labour is one way to adapt to changes in the
environment that requires very little experience on the part of the bee
(they simply shift labour to where it is needed most - mediated not by
smarts but likely by a very sensitive sensory-hormonal system that they are
born with). I know that bees can learn many things, but I think if someone
were to figure out a way to measure how much a being's behavior relys on
learning, many mammals would score higher than honey bees.  Many insects
would score lower than honey bees.  So were smarter, so what ?  I don't
think it is anything to brag about.  We can't fly, our societies are not
nearly as integrate as a hive, we can't walk on the walls, we don't undergo
metamorphosis (at least not as severely as bees do), and we don't have cool
compound eyes.  I would love to have anyone of those characters, and in some
ways, I feel evolution may have dealt us the short end of the stick.
 
Hope everyones winter is going okay (or summer if your down in the southern
hemisphere).
 
Cheers
Adony Melathopoulos
Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada