[ExI] bees

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-12-03 05:49, spike wrote:
> Now of course I start thinking of ways to measure how bees are 
> feeling.  Perhaps they fly a little differently when well-fed and 
> fully healthy.  We could raise some in isolation and feed them all the 
> best pollen, try to create a control group.  Then make some kind of 
> optical measurement device, a camera which measures flight speed, 
> oscillation rates, hover times, and anything else we can figure out 
> how to reduce to a matrix of data using optical data.  Then we compare 
> to domestic bees and wild bees.

Clearly there must be some behavioural signs you are picking up, if you 
are not imagining it. I can imagine taking a bundle of data of perky and 
tired bees and using machine learning to categorize them - but that 
requires having samples of the kinds. One could also do clustering of 
their behaviour and see if there are clusters that look suspicious - but 
again, if all the bees in the back yard are tired this will not show much.

I don't have a good feeling for the Bay Area ecosystem, but it always 
struck me as having unusually few insects around. I was so happy seeing 
that moth larva with you and the kid last time I was over.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20151203/9aa2d54d/attachment.html>