During the last thirty years innumerable minor inventions have sprung to light, such as sections, smokers, zigzag porches, combination hives, invertible frames, movable floor-boards, feeders, foundation fixers, queen-excluders, and so forth. These discoveries belong, of course, to the province of art rather than science. But the scientific side of the question has not been neglected. Darwin, in 1859, gave us a very ingenious theory of the probable origin of the cell-making instinct. At the present time the point upon which inquirers seem to be concentrating their attention is the nervous system of bees. We have learnt from Sir J. Lubbock that they can smell, and are able to distinguish colours. It is almost certain that, although deaf to ordinary noises, they can hear notes of a pitch too high for human ears; the microscopic organs of smell and hearing have been traced in the antennae ; and, in short, the whole anatomy has been investigated with a patient minuteness which can best be appreciated by those who have before them the works of Siebold and Cheshire. Every year brings something new to light, and, complete as our knowledge of the subject now appears to be, it cannot be doubted that much still remains to reward the labours of patient enthusiasts in the future.

R. C. DAY. (1890). ON SOME OLD BEE-MASTERS. The Gentleman's Magazine, Volume 268

¶

The small brains of insects and other invertebrates are often thought to constrain these animals to live entirely ‘in the moment’. In this view, each one of their many seemingly hard-wired behavioral routines is triggered by a precisely defined environmental stimulus configuration, but there is no mental appreciation of the possible outcomes of one’s actions, and therefore little flexibility. However, many studies show problem-solving behavior in various arthropod species that falls outside the range of fixed behavior routines. We propose that a basic form of foresight, the ability to predict the outcomes of one’s own actions, is at the heart of such behavioral flexibility … we speculate that it may be simpler, in terms of the required evolutionary changes, computation and neural architecture, for arthropods to recognize their goal and predict the outcomes of their actions towards that goal, rather than having a large number of pre-programmed behaviors necessary to account for their observed behavioral flexibility.

Perry, C. J., & Chittka, L. (2019). How foresight might support the behavioral flexibility of arthropods. Current opinion in neurobiology, 54

PLB

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html