>Bees are very limited by brain size alone, so any claims that they are
going beyond instinct are going to need some pretty extraordinary poof.
The Chittka team's 'trainer bee' and string pulling experiments are pretty
convincing in my opinion.
And he addresses head-on (no pun intended) the question of neural capacity
starting at about the 56 minute mark in the previously referenced video,
which correlates to a series of papers published c. 2017:
'Olfactory learning without the mushroom bodies: Spiking neural network
models of the honeybee lateral antennal lobe tract reveal its capacities in
odour memory tasks of varied complexities' -
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.10055
51
'A Simple Computational Model of the Bee Mushroom Body Can Explain Seemingly
Complex Forms of Olfactory Learning and Memory' -
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)31288-X.pdf
'Insect Bio-inspired Neural Network Provides New Evidence on How Simple
Feature Detectors Can Enable Complex Visual Generalization and Stimulus
Location Invariance in the Miniature Brain of Honeybees' -
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.10053
33
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