A 2011 paper in the scientific journal
Biology Letters written by 8 year olds.
Blackawton bees1. Introduction
(a) Once upon a time …
People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them.
Scientists do experiments on monkeys, because they are similar to man, but bees could actually be close to man too. We see bees in the natural habitat doing what they do, but you do not really see them doing human things—such as solving human puzzles like Sudoku. So it makes you wonder if they could solve a human puzzle. If they could solve it, it would mean that they are really smart, smarter than we thought before, which would mean that humans might have some link with bees. If bees are like us in some way, then understanding them could help us understand ourselves better.
To get ready to do the experiments with the bees we first talked about science being about playing games and making puzzles. We then got into groups and made up games to play using random pieces of physical education equipment. This gave us experience of thinking of games and puzzles. We then had to explain our games to other people. After talking about what it is like to create games and how games have rules, we talked about seeing the world in different ways by wearing bug eyes, mirrors and rolled-up books. We then watched the David Letterman videos of ‘Stupid Dog Tricks’, in which dogs were trained to do funny things. Next, we too had to learn to solve a puzzle that Beau (a neuroscientist) and Mr Strudwick (our headteacher) gave us (which took an artificial brain 10 000 trials to solve, but only four for us). Afterwards, we started asking questions about bees, and then more specific questions about seeing colour using the bee arena (figure 1).
Conditions and responses to ‘test 1’ (control). (a) The pattern of colours that the bees were trained to and tested on in their first test (see text for explanation). (b) The selections made by all the bees tested (dots show where each bee landed and tried to get sugar water). (c) A table showing the preferences of each bee during testing (see text for explanation).
We came up with lots of questions, but the one we decided to look at was whether bees could learn to use the spatial relationships between colours to figure out which flowers had sugar water in them and which had salt water in them. It is interesting to ask this question, because in their habitat there may be flowers that are bad for them, or flowers from which they might already have collected nectar. This would mean that it is important for bees to learn which flower to go to or to avoid, which would need them to remember the flowers that were around it, which is like a puzzle.
To test this we gave the bees a series of challenges to see if they could complete them or not, and then tested them to see if they solved the puzzle and how they solved it. It was a difficult puzzle, because the bees could not just learn to go to the colour of the flower. Instead, they had to learn to go to one colour (blue) if it was surrounded by the opposite colour (yellow), but also to go to the opposite colour (yellow) if it was surrounded by blue. We also wanted to know if all the bees solved the puzzle in the same way. If not, it would mean that bees have personality (if a bee goes to the blue flower every time, it tells us that it really likes blue).
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4. Discussion
This experiment is important, because, as far as we know, no one in history (including adults) has done this experiment before. It tells us that bees can learn to solve puzzles (and if we are lucky we will be able to get them to do Sudoku in a couple of years' time). In this experiment, we trained bees to solve a particular puzzle. The puzzle was go to blue if surrounded by yellow, but yellow if surrounded by blue.
Test 1 showed that the bees learned to solve this puzzle. We know this because the test results showed that they mostly went to the flowers that they were supposed to go to, because those were the ones that had contained a sugar reward before. However, we also noticed that the bees solved the puzzle in different ways, and that some were more clever than others. Two bees preferred yellow and two others preferred blue flowers. The B bee was best at understanding the pattern in the first test, because it had the most correct answers compared to incorrect answers. It also went both to correct yellow and correct blue flowers, although it preferred the blue flowers.
What is important about this puzzle is that there is more than one strategy the bees could use to solve it. One strategy would be to use two rules: (i) go to the middle four flowers in each panel, and (ii) ignore the colour. Another strategy would be to go to yellow if surrounded by blue or blue if surrounded by yellow. They could also learn to avoid the surrounding flowers, and as a result only go to the middle flowers. Or they could go to the fewest number of coloured flowers in each panel. Of course they could also have chosen randomly, and they might get them right or they might get them wrong. Or they could have just gone to a colour, but then they would not have solved the whole puzzle, only half of it.
Test 2 tested whether the bees had learned to go to the middle of each panel and ignored the colour. If this was true then they should have gone to the green flowers. If they had learned to go to only middle blue and yellow flowers, then they should have gone either to the surrounding blue and yellow flowers or no flowers at all. The results tell us that three of the bees preferred to go to the colours that they had learned before, and avoided the middle green flowers. Two of the bees, however, mainly went to the middle flowers, including the B bee, which went to both correct yellow and correct blue flowers during the first (control) test. So they had learned to solve the puzzle using different rules. Test 3 also showed that one of the rules was not just to go to any middle flower, as they rarely went to the middle flowers, or to go to the flowers that had the fewest colours in each panel, because they did not prefer the corner flowers. Instead, they seemed to select the flowers at random, but funnily continued to go to their ‘favourite’ colour.
We conclude that bees can solve puzzles by learning complex rules, but sometimes they make mistakes. They can also work together (indirectly) to solve a puzzle. Which means that bees have personality and have their personal ‘likings’. We also learned that the bees could use the ‘shape’ of the different patterns of individual flowers to decide which flowers to go to. So they are quite clever, because they can memorize a pattern. This might help them get more pollen from flowers by learning which flowers might be best for them without wasting energy. In real life this might mean that they collect information and remember that information when going into different fields. So if some plants die out, they can learn to find nectar in another type of flower.
Before doing these experiments we did not really think a lot about bees and how they are as smart as us. We also did not think about the fact that without bees we would not survive, because bees keep the flowers going. So it is important to understand bees. We discovered how fun it was to train bees. This is also cool because you do not get to train bees everyday. We like bees. Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before. (Bees—seem to—think!)
So cute
Topic: Random Science Posts