take your time to choose, bee

But you want reasons beyond that? I assure you there is much more to bees than just honey. To me, he has an almost mathematical intelligence. This is most evident in the hexagons that make up their homes. How did these creatures figure out that hexagons are the most efficient shape – taking into account surface area and strength – for making honeycombs?

In addition to hexagons, he has the Wiggle Dance (see my column from 2012, she stumbles again, https://bit.ly/3QwxCVc, Similarly, bees that go out in search of food tell their mates back in the hive how far and in which direction the food is. They move their torso symbolically. This dance is essentially, as it were, mathematical. It speaks of the distance and quality of the food, how long the dance is and how intensely the dancer wobbles. It tells the angle from the Sun in the direction in which the food is located. Of course, as the Sun’s position in the sky changes during the day, the angle changes, and the dance would make this clear.

In fact, how could you not love creatures that rock their shapely torsos?

The thing about bees is that there is ever-increasing evidence of their intelligence. I’ll come to some of that. But first, what’s almost as fascinating as their intelligence are the experiments scientists devise to measure their intelligence.

For example, how do we know that the waggle dance encodes distance to food? Think of taking a train through a desert. Nothing is visible except miles of sand. You have no idea how fast the train is moving. How will you tell a friend later how far you travelled? There’s no easy way, is there? But suppose there were regular milestones? Or even regular telephone poles, placed along the track? You can count the poles and tell your friend you crossed 1,263 of them, and it tells you how far it was. Similarly, scout bees alert their mates to visual stimuli that they will fly into the path of the food. The greater the excitement, the longer the meal, the longer the dance.

How did the bee researchers figure it out? They got the bees to fly to a food source, but through a long tunnel. At first there was no sign in the tunnel. When the Scouts returned home, they presented only a short dance to their fellow-residents. This didn’t mean it was only a short distance from food, but it didn’t have any special features to report that would guide their flight. Fellow-inhabitants only have to trust that if they move in a specified direction, they will eventually find food.

But then, the researchers brightened up the tunnel by painting stripes on it. Voilà: The dance is long over. The more stripes, the longer the dance. Namely, the wagler is telling the other bees in his hive: “There are lots of visual stimuli on the way to the food. Keep an eye on them, fellows!”

Simple and yet ingenious, you would agree. Decoding the bees’ waggle dance won Austrian ethologist Karl Ritter von Frisch the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. To me, this is a measure of the awe-inspiring depth in the behavior of these creatures.

Let me describe to you the apparatus that some scientists use for a different experiment. He built a cube, a meter or a little less on each side. One of the walls of the structure was a translucent screen made of hard plastic. 46 holes were made in the plastic, each half a centimeter in diameter. Pairs of holes were separated by 10 cm, and together, 46 were arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Food items—sugar solutions, mostly—can be placed in any given hole on the outside of the cube.

On this screen, scientists can project images of “virtual flowers” – actually colored circles just 2.5 cm in diameter – focused on the holes. At any given time, he had eight of these flowers on screen. Four of these flowers – call them “targets” – were purely blue and had a drop of sugar solution placed in their holes. The other four flowers were also blue, but tinged with green. These “distractors” carried either plain water, or a foul-smelling solution of quinine, in their holes.

got all that? Once the equipment was ready, the bumblebees were sent to the cube for “training”, over two days. In that time, the locations of the flowers changed randomly every hour. After the training period, “bees were tested individually for three consecutive foraging bouts”. ,Bees lock down the motion of foraging for accuracyLars Chitka et al., Nature24 July 2003, https://go.nature.com/3ixWlvG,

And what did these tested bees show the observing scientists?

When distracting flowers only contain water, it means there’s no real penalty for picking the wrong flower, just no reward of a tasty sugar solution. At that time, bees that spent more time trying to decide on a flower—how long they flew indecisively between flowers—were more accurate in the choices they made. In contrast, “bees that made faster choices were more error-prone”.

Then again, if there’s no real penalty for the wrong choice, does their low accuracy make any sense? So in the next round, the distractor flowers were prepared with a solution of quinine.

The result: bees that made fast choices the first time did so the second time around, and were just as error-prone. But the bees that took longer to decide now took even longer to decide, and were even more accurate in their choices.

As the scientists concluded, “choice accuracy in bees depends on how much time is allotted to solve the task”. It must strike some familiar chords among humans. and “even individual insects differ in their reluctance to make errors”.

That too, must strike some familiar chords among humans. Like you.

Dilip D’Souza, once a computer scientist, now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinner. His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun.