Jan 13 And then there's today's column in Mint. Some years ago a lovely lady who's reading this (well, I hope) spent an afternoon explaining the "waggle dance" that bees do. She had earned her PhD studying bees (though maybe not the waggle dance), so I was inclined to pay attention. I'm glad I did, because it was a revelation. It's a remarkably intelligent thing those beautiful insects do.
But there's also research showing that the intelligence of bees extends in other directions as well. Like, in making choices. So that's why I wrote today's column in Mint. Take your time to choose, bee, https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/take-your-time-to-choose-bee-11673528230803.html cheers, dilip --- Take your time to choose, bee As long as they don't sting me - the last time was when I was six years old - I'm a fan of bees. The first time I remember thinking that is when I discovered that bees make honey. How can you not adore a creature that produces such a delicacy, and makes it look so exquisite too? But you want reasons beyond that? There's more to bees than just their honey, I assure you. For me, there's their almost mathematical intelligence. That's most obvious in the hexagons that make up their homes. How did these creatures figure that hexagons are the most efficient shapes - taking surface area and robustness into account - to craft honeycombs? Hexagons apart, there's their waggle dance (see my column from 2012, "She's waggling again", https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/lHnw2AJ9Db8fucOFDuzXDO/She8217s-waggling-again.html). This is how bees that go out to scout for food tell their mates back at the hive how far and in what direction the food is. They waggle their torsoes suggestively. This dance is essentially, believe it, mathematical. It speaks of the distance to and quality of the food, encoded in how long the dance is and how intensely the dancer waggles. It conveys the angle from the sun of the direction in which the food lies. Of course, as the sun's position in the sky changes through the day, the angle changes, and the dance will make that clear. Really, how can you not adore creatures that waggle their shapely torsoes? The thing about bees is, there's steadily more evidence of their intelligence. I'll come to some of that. But first, what's almost as fascinating as their intelligence are the experiments that scientists devise to gauge their intelligence. For example, how do we know how the waggle dance encodes the distance to food? Think of taking a train through a desert. You see nothing but sand for miles upon miles. You don't have a sense of how fast the train is moving. How do you tell a friend later how far you travelled? No easy way, right? But suppose there were regular milestones? Or even regular telephone poles, placed alongside the track? You could count the poles and tell your friend that you passed 1263 of them, say, and that would suggest how far it had been. Similarly, the scout bees give their mates a sense of the visual stimuli they will overfly on their way to the food. The more such stimuli, the further the food, the longer the dance. How did bee researchers work this out? They got bees to fly to a food source, but through a long tunnel. At first, the tunnel had no markings at all. When the scouts returned home, they offered their fellow-residents only a short dance. This did not necessarily mean it was just a short distance to the food, but that there were no particular features to report on that would guide their flight. Fellow-residents would simply have to trust that if they headed out in the specified direction, eventually they would find food. But then the researchers brightened up the tunnel by painting stripes on it. Voilà: the dance became longer. The more the stripes, the longer the dance. That is, the waggler is telling the other bees in her hive: "There are a lot of visual stimuli on the way to the food. Keep an eye out for them, mates!" Ingenious and yet simple, you'll agree. Decoding bees' waggle dance won the Austrian ethologist Karl Ritter von Frisch a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973. To me, that's a measure of the awe-inspiring profundity that's in the behaviour of these creatures. Let me describe for you the apparatus some scientists used for a different experiment. They constructed a near cube, a metre or a little less on each side. One of the structure's walls was a translucent screen made of hard plastic. Punched in the plastic were 46 holes, each half a centimetre in diameter. Pairs of holes were separated by 10cm and together, the 46 were arranged in a hexagonal pattern. Food items - sugar solution, mostly - could be placed in any given hole from outside the cube. Onto this screen, the scientists could project images of "virtual flowers" - really just coloured circles 2.5cm in diamter - centered on the holes. At any given time, they had 8 of these flowers on the 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-tasting solution of quinine, in their holes. Got all that? Once the apparatus was ready, bumblebees were sent into the cube for "training", over two days. In that time, the flower locations changed at random every hour. After the training period, "bees were tested individually for three consecutive foraging bouts." ("Bees trade off foraging speed for accuracy", Lars Chittka et al, Nature, 24 July 2003, https://www.nature.com/articles/424388a). And what did these tested bees demonstrate to the watching scientists? When the distractor flowers contain only water, it means that there is no real penalty for choosing a wrong flower, just no reward of a tasty sugar solution. At those times, bees that spent longer trying to decide on a flower - measured by how long they flew indecisively between flowers - were more accurate in the choices they made. In contrast, "bees that made rapid choices were more error-prone." Then again, if there's no real penalty for a wrong choice, does their lower accuracy mean much? So in the next round, distractor flowers were primed with the quinine solution. Result: the bees that made rapid choices the first time around did the same 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 conclude, "accuracy of choice in bees depends on how much time is allocated to solving the task." That must strike some familar chords among humans. And "even individual insects vary in their reluctance to make errors." That, too, must strike some familiar chords among humans. Like you. -- My book with Joy Ma: "The Deoliwallahs" Twitter: @DeathEndsFun Death Ends Fun: http://dcubed.blogspot. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dilip's essays" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dilips-essays+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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