Facial Recognition (Sheep Do It, Bees Do It, Even Educated Fleas Do It...)

Our lunch break was made a bit brighter today by our newspaper-scouring pal over at Cook's Log Blog, who made us aware of a New York Times article on the recently "discovered" fact that bees recognize faces.

This reminds me of the last "big discovery" along similar lines: crows' capacity to recognize human faces, as charmingly reported on NPR and in this New York Times item. As always, the critters know way more than we give them credit for.

You can find a whole lot of interesting stuff along these lines by googlin' "animals recognize faces," including the fascinating fact that children recognize faces better than adults.

Apis Abacus

A newly published study entitled Number-based Visual Generalisation in the Honeybee finds that honeybees can count, setting them apart from many other animals and (as far as we know) all other invertebrates. Here's the abstract:

Although the numerical abilities of many vertebrate species have been investigated in the scientific literature, there are few convincing accounts of invertebrate numerical competence. Honeybees, Apis mellifera, by virtue of their other impressive cognitive feats, are a prime candidate for investigations of this nature. We therefore used the well-established delayed match-to-sample paradigm, to test the limits of honeybees' ability to match two visual patterns solely on the basis of the shared number of elements in the two patterns. Using a y-maze, we found that bees can not only differentiate between patterns containing two and three elements, but can also use this prior knowledge to differentiate three from four, without any additional training. However, bees trained on the two versus three task could not distinguish between higher numbers, such as four versus five, four versus six, or five versus six. Control experiments confirmed that the bees were not using cues such as the colour of the exact configuration of the visual elements, the combined area or edge length of the elements, or illusory contours formed by the elements. To our knowledge, this is the first report of number-based visual generalisation by an invertebrate.

Read the entire study on honeybee counting or check out this user-friendly summary of the research on the Science News website.

The Larger Sanity

An example of what Gary Snyder might call "the larger sanity":

A man with vertigo scales the 52-story New York Times building without rope, harness, or parachute to make a statement about the urgency of global warming.

Thank you, Alain, for popping over from Paris to remind us of what we already know and aren't yet doing nearly enough about.

Alain Robert: The Solution is Simple

1

Global Swarming Honeybees turns 1 year old today. Thanks much for your visits, your comments, your support. Feel free to share article ideas, requests, resources, and desires for year 2.

In the meantime, let us meditate HARD upon the following—as if, like the Buddhists say, our heads were on fire:

"When you're walking down the street and see a little flower popping up through a crack in the sidewalk—are you going to root for the flower or the pavement?"

—eco-hero Mark Massara

Honeybees Sweeten the Lives of Ex-Offenders

Thanks to bee-boy Thew for sending a link to a marvelous Chicago Tribune video about Sweet Beginnings, an economic development program that uses beekeeping as a path to a better life for ex-offenders and others who face barriers to attaining employment that pays a living wage.

I've been meaning to write about Sweet Beginnings for some time, since services that enable ex-offenders to rebuild their lives is a particular interest of mine. In the video, Gerald Whitehead, one of the men who has transformed into a beekeeper through his involvement with Sweet Beginnings, has this to say:

"I'm reconstructing my whole life, just like the bees that have to reconstruct their hive, the honeycomb, to prepare for the next stage—that's what I'm doing with my life."

Read the accompanying Trib article, The Felons and the Bees.

And meet some more of the people whose lives have been changed by honeybees and Sweet Beginnings.

Thoughts for the New Year

I've just started E.O. Wilson's new book, The Creation, an urgent plea from a Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist to protect biodiversity by finding common ground between the "science community" and the "religious community" in order to halt the biological holocaust before it is too late. It's now or never, folks, and Wilson makes the case in potent terms.

The book is written in the form of a letter to a pastor, illuminating the intertwingular zone where spiritual belief, respect for the natural world, and science connect. Some passages of interest from the first few pages:

"According to archaeological evidence, we strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that has given us birth. It nourished the belief that the human spirit can be molded into something new to fit changes in the environment and culture, and as a result the timetables of history desynchronized. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival."

***

"Even if the rest of life is counted of no value beyond the satisfaction of human bodily needs, the obliteration of Nature is a dangerous strategy. For one thing, we have become a species specialized to eat the seeds of four kinds of grass—wheat, rice, corn, and millet. If these fail, from disease or climate change, we too shall fail. Some fifty thousand wild plant species (many of which face extinction) offer alternative food sources. If one insists on being thoroughly practical about the matter, allowing these and rest of the wild species to exist should be considered part of a portfolio of long-term investment. Even the most recalcitrant people must come to view conservation as simple prudence in the management of Earth's natural economy. Yet few have begun to think that way at all."

***

"Granted, many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems. But so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them. This in my mind is a perversion. It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth."


—E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

Listen to an interview with Wilson on NPR or check out this televised interview on PBS's Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Bird Brains

Some pretty cool crows.

Sip

On hot days, it's fun to watch the honeybees collect water from the dewy grass. If you watch closely, you see them sip up droplet after droplet of dew—it's amazing to see how much they can carry.

This clever little honeybee comes repeatedly throughout the day to gather water from the Styrofoam self-watering seedling tray I keep on the deck. I guess she likes a slightly higher-tech setting for all this water-gathering business.
Speaking of tech, the bees use the water to cool the hive by fanning it with their wings. That's pretty much how an air-conditioner works. H. Sapiens aside, I can't think of any other animal beside the honeybee that has figured out how to air-condition its living quarters—sans electricity, no less. Rock on, smart little bee.

On Brains, Beauty, and the Spirit of the Hive

"What is this 'spirit of the hive'--where does it reside?"

In his poetic, philosophically rich treatise on honeybees, The Life of the Bee, Maurice Maeterlinck asked this question regarding the mystery whereby 60,000+ honeybees in a colony carry out innumerable tasks in a highly effective, coordinated manner; locate and share data on the ever-shifting array of available nectar sources; decide when to swarm or supercede an old queen; coordinate defense of their colony; and, through countless incremental acts of cooperation, specialization, and communication, achieve the goals of reproduction and survival.

Watching the colony from the human-outside, one begins to suspect that the underpinning of this ameobic mind-body-spirit is a vast communication network that makes the Internet look quaint and the Psychic Hotline look like Amateur Hour.

Maeterlinck was grappling with these questions in 1901, and pretty much everyone who has written about honeybees before or since has wound up doing the same. It's impossible to watch a colony in action without perceiving a deeply complex mind at work. And, as humans entranced with power and hierarchy, it really messes with our heads to think of "queen" and "workers" without making all sorts of assumptions and projections about who's running the show in there.

Having been at this beekeeping thing for only a few weeks, I don't pretend to have the faintest clue about what's going on in the hives. I am watching the bees, reading as much as I can about them, and savoring the mysteries they pose.

I was pleased to come upon the article below on honeybees behavior and colony dynamics this morning. It describes some interesting new research on honeybee behavior, plus a quick overview of honeybee basics like the "waggle dance."
***

Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing from PhysOrg.com

Undergraduate education generally involves acquiring “received knowledge” – in other words, absorbing the past discoveries of scholars and scientists. But University of North Carolina at Charlotte senior biology major Andrew Pierce went beyond the textbooks and uncovered something previously unknown.[...]

***
Of course, the article contains the annoying (requisite) pronouncement that, "Bees do not have large brains and are not capable of complex thought like humans." To which I say, Their brains may be small, but they're still outwitting the scientists trying to figure them out!

It seems most every article about how "complex" or "intelligent" an animal is includes the comforting caveat that "they're not as smart as us"—because we humans are just SOOOO smart! (It makes us feel bad to consider the possibility that intelligence takes many forms and expressions that we, in our supremely limited way of seeing things, simply fail to appreciate, recognize, or understand.)

That's what I like about the honeybees—they make us look kind of dumb.