Does anybody know WHERE or IF Dr. Einstein actually said,
''If all the bees disappeared tomorrow, humans would have only four
years left on the planet.''
* leaving aside for the moment the obvious: there isn't any way that
ALL the bees would disappear in one day, except nuclear holocaust, and
I doubt we would survive even four years after that
Also, I saw this one:
"One project uses the famous honeybee dance language to explore the
underlying foundation for addiction in humans."
* the source of this seeming non-sequitir may be:
"Octopamine modulates honey bee dance behavior" by Andrew B. Barron,
Gene E. Robinson, et al.
"In mammals, responses to all rewarding stimuli, such as food, safety,
and sexual gratification, share common neural circuitry and
mechanisms. These generalized reward-responsive circuits ramify
extensively through the mammalian forebrain, and when stimulated, they
release dopamine, a biogenic amine with structural similarities to
Octopamine ... Perhaps there exist octopaminergic generalized
reward-responsive circuits in the honey bee brain that mediate reward
perception, learning, and reward-seeking motivation. ... If this
hypothesis is correct, it would suggest a framework for unifying the
diverse roles of OA in the learning of rewarding stimuli, motivation
to forage for floral rewards, arousal, and the evaluation of floral
rewards communicated by dances (this work)."
"There has been much speculation about how dance behavior in honey
bees might have evolved from the simpler behavioral patterns involved
in food searching. Esch (40) proposed that the waggle dance evolved as
a ritualization of simpler intention movements that partly reenacted
flying to flowers. Octopamine modulation of honey bee dance behavior
supports this hypothesis by identifying a commonality between the
neurochemical mechanisms motivating personal appetitive behavior and
the social dance response."
--
Peter Borst
see:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/5/1703
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