Honeybees are incredibly talented for insects. The manufacture honey and they communicate with each other by dancing to tell their hive mates where to find flowers. But bees can also be trained to do things that bees won't normally do by instinct, like solve puzzles or play ball games. The research on bees' dances have led scientists to focus on how they can judge and communicate distances. Experiments that test a bee's geolocation ability is how we found out that bees have some understanding of numbers, which is rather mind-blowing. I'm also very impressed by the scientists who managed to figure out what the bees are saying when they dance. This episode of Ze Frank's True Facts series is unusually wholesome, almost devoid of salacious jokes. Honeybees are probably smart enough to appreciate that. There's a one-minute skippable ad at the 5:15 mark.
this is sort of a scam to say honeybees play with balls. first they're not honeybees, they're bumblebees. second: bumblebees don'r make comb, they raise larva and store honey in distinct round wax containers that look enough like the balls provided to trigger their colony maintenance instinct, so they try to move it to a protected place. anthropomorphizing much?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't say Honeybees, it says bees love balls but doesn't say what kind.
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
I'm just here for the salacious jokes.
ReplyDelete