> The post was referring to the difference 
> between conscious choice and search bias.

Yes, that was made very clear.

But doesn't it seem that "conscious" thought itself, let alone choice,
requires just a few more neurons than the Lord gave bees?  From a purely
mechanistic view, any creature with the sort of "distributed processing"
implied by the optic, thoracic, and abdominal ganglia is not very likely to
be capable of "choice" as we understand it.

We do know that bees engage in speculative foraging even when excellent food
sources are being exploited, so it stands to reason that they would also
engage in purely speculative exploring when looking for a new home.  I would
sometimes see a bee flying just above stall speed straight down the middle
of the barn between stalls, equidistant between ceiling, floor, and walls.
When I saw that, I knew that one of the colonies in my barnyard ICU for
problematic hives was thinking of swarming.  This behavior is easily
explained as instinctive, but thousands of instinctive acts can leave the
impression of coordinated intelligence.

But the issue of flower fidelity seems to indicate that once an individual
bee's mind is "programmed" with a memory, it will not "forget" that bloom or
"re-learn" a new bloom when the first bloom is no longer the best source of
food.  

The excellent work done by Bill Towne of Kutztown (PA) U showing that
individual bees do not "re-learn" the local terrain when hives are moved is
another example of how bees are just not capable of changing their minds.
Bees only fall back on terrain mapping when the sky is completely overcast,
weather that is not ideal for nectar production anyway, so the impact on
foraging and pollination is minor.
 
So if individual bees can only learn something once, and cannot seem to
re-learn basic things like "what does my home terrain look like?"  I can't
imagine that they are capable of "choice", in that making a "choice"
requires an ability to change one's mind about an issue based upon new
evidence, and it seems that bees can't do that for foraging or homing.

 

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