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Date: | Fri, 10 Mar 2023 16:52:23 -0500 |
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Honey bees are forest creatures. Without a tree hollow, they have no convenient nest.
When presented with the "modern agriculture" approach - massive unended fields of monoculture, they have no landmarks, and they like landmarks for "final approach" navigation.
So, given a landmark, they gravitate to it, as they can't really work out distances well over endless featureless areas - just like us.
In the Atacama Desert of Chile, it is easy for humans to get disoriented, lost, and dead without a GPS or compass, as the stunning lack of any nearby landmarks makes one do stupid things, like trying to do "dead reckoning" using mountain peaks that are 50 km away or further, which never works.
So, the bees are doing what you'd do if you were dropped into the middle of a similar featureless plain of a size that would be equivalent to that of a bee in a large farm field.
The Atacama is a unique experience. There's also the Atacama Large Millimeter Array - 60+ radio telescopes, the Very Large Telescope, and the soon-to-be finished "European Extremely Large Telescope". But they are all dwarfed by the desert itself.
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