I know Joe Ayers from our DARPA work. His work on lobsters, their
biomechanics, and neural systems has contributed greatly to both the understanding
of these organisms and to the development of robotics.
A couple of years ago, he started working with bees in some of his classes,
and from what I gather, he got hooked on bees. He talked to me about how
to do some of the things they were attempting, since we know each other
from the Biomimetics work at DARPA.
Note to Bob - this is an NSF project, at the basic science level. NSF
seldom funds applied research and from my experience is even more reluctant to
fund applied honey bee studies - since this is applied research, honey
bees are an introduced species, and there are five Federal Bee Labs who do bee
research.
One question NSF often asks itself (I've been on their review panels) - is
there anyone else who might fund this? If so, NSF is reluctant to spend
its money on the project. That's not to say NSF doesn't fund bee research -
like mapping a genome, but in general, NSF funded bee research will
parallel this Harvard study, where the organism mainly serves as a model or test
system, rather than any interest in honey bees per se. (This is just my
opinion, but I've had this discussion with a variety of NSF program officers,
and they usually say the same).
So, if you look at the Harvard project (follow the link from Peter), you
will find this is not a bee study, its advanced computation, artificial
intelligence, group interactions and communications, robotics, etc. But, the
bee serves as a model of reference. Ideas and knowledge gleaned from bees
will be used to help develop and guide the work.
DARPA has used this approach to develop advanced avionics - miniature
flying robots that simulate the flight of flies, robots that scramble across
rough terrain using principals of locomotion based on lobsters and
cockroaches, and one of the most interesting (in my mind) areas of work is done in
Australia where the investigators asked - why do insects and bees have those
large compound eyes, and how do they fly at high speed through vegetation
without crashing into things? From this, they came up with a concept of
navigation and vision that is vastly different from the mammalian eye, one that
is much simpler, yet extremely efficient and much easier to use in robots
that find their own way through obstacle courses, through buildings, etc.
They were even working on a 3-D version for helicopters.
Again, they learned a lot about how bees see and use that sense, and they
then engineered improved optical guidance systems for use in advanced
robots and other needs for 'artificial vision'.
From my perspective, no money was Taken from Beekeepers or Bee Researchers
by the Harvard Project, since it was funded by NSF. It is tax payer
dollars, just as all federally funded science is tax payer dollars. But NSF
money would never be used to bail out/pay damages to beekeepers.
NSF mainly funds basic research, NIH funds health research, USDA
agricultural, DOE energy-related, etc. Each federal agency has its own budget.
From all appearances, the Harvard project was a competitively won project -
NSF awards a limited number of these large, multi-disciplinary projects.
This is not likely to be a Congressional Plus Up. So, the research team had
to work hard and compete against other groups, ideas; and in the end, they
got the nod. One way or another, NSF would have made an award - in this
case we got lucky that it had something to do with bees, even if tangentially.
I'd say that the bee industry hasn't lost anything, and with this type of
innovative, never attempted research, the outcomes can be surprising. We may
yet see knowledge about bees that could well serve the bee industry -
although that's not the central purpose of the program.
Jerry
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