>> But, you really can't get much more than some instinctive responses and
some memory with only 960,000 neurons in a bee brain.
> Dr. Chittka's excellent research on bee cognition appears to suggest
otherwise.
Dr. Chittka persistently concludes "more intelligence" as the reason for
mere variation in behavior among any group of bees obeying the same simple
instinctive rule. To me, this kind of claim is akin to the TV program on
the (USA) "History Channel", "Ancient Aliens", where even well-known
artifacts of earlier human civilization are posited as the handiwork of
aliens. The conclusion offered is consistently "Ancient Astronaut Theorists
Say Yes!". Clearly, there are simpler solutions that do not require the
appearance of "aliens".
I think the clearest example of this is the following statement, in "The
Mind of The Bee":
"As with many other behaviors that are commonly regarded as strictly
instinctual, such as spider web construction, innate predispositions may
only provide a rough template for baseline behavior. The details often need
to be learned, can be adapted flexibly to environmental conditions, and may
be subject to planning." (p. 60).
Above, the book endows the bee with a "learning behavior", but if you look
at the bibliography for Ch 6, the book never gives any examples of bees who
get "better" at any task with experience and "learning". He goes on in the
chapter to conflate mere use of well-known memory (bloom locations, how
quickly the nectar from that bloom was offloaded by house bees, etc) as if
it were a "skill". All this needs some support with some measurements that
prove a qualitative claim like this, as some bees may seem "better" than
others due to the normal variation that comes with the autonomy of thousands
of individual actors, each of them presented with similar, but slightly
different condition scenarios. Yes, of course remembering a stand of blooms
is "learning", but the memory is very specific, and while saving time for
the forager, it does not change how foraging is accomplished, nor any
"details" of the task of foraging. In this regard, a bee has not "learned"
in the manner Chittka would like to claim, the bee has only remembered,
which is a very specific thing.
When someone writes a book, rather than a paper, they can either do a very
detailed job of supporting each factoid with a citation, or one can just lay
a claim out there with no citation to any study in support. The magical
thing about books is that no one does any refereeing prior to publication as
would be done with a paper in a journal.
Tom Seeley's "The Wisdom of The Hive" is a good example of "robust
citations", as reading that book me nearly took a month, and I only read the
abstracts of most of the papers cited, via the databases offered by the NY
(City) Public Library to those of us who still have our silver "Research
Library" cards, so pulling up papers was nearly instantaneous. But there
was **nothing** claimed in Seeley's book (or in the follow-up books by
Seeley "Honeybee Democracy", and "The Lives of Bees") that was not supported
by at least one, often several citations to peer-reviewed work.
I'm not saying that bees brains aren't impressive little things, and yes,
bees have brains with more neurons than most all insects, but there are
limits to what one can do with less than 1,000,000 neurons, and while Seeley
admits this, Chittka engages in flights of fancy that tend to mislead.
All that said, my wife STILL sings to her bees as she works her hives
("Disney Princess Beekeeper"), and she has convinced herself that they can
hear her, and like it, or at least "don't mind it one bit". I have
convinced myself that it is because they can't hear her at all that they
"don't mind it one bit". Guess which one of us has the citations?
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