[ExI] Bees learn to pull a string to get food

[spike]

>...On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: [ExI] Bees learn to pull a string to get food

We know that crows can pull on a string to get a prize, but now bees can do it as well!

<http://www.popsci.com/watch-bumblebee-tug-string-to-get-lunch>


Quote:
Bumblebees can be taught to yank a string to collect a sweet treat, scientists reported today in the journal PLOS Biology. Bees also picked up this “highly unnatural” way of foraging from watching each other...------------BillK

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Thanks BillK, this is astonishing!

I worked with ants a few years ago trying to teach them new tricks and had no luck, but I now think the problem might have been bad design of experiment.

Recall I had ants in my fruit tree farming aphids.  They form trails on the tree trunk, since that species of ant lives in the ground.  I created a barrier, then made a narrow bridge over the barrier.  I made two holes in the bridge through which the ants needed to pass.  They never did learn how to make each hole a one-way road, so they balled up in a huge 
Formicidable traffic jam, of mandibles, thoraxes, mandibles and abdomens.  Had they not been all female, one would think it was intentional, an orgy of some sort.

More recently, I looked closer and noticed something I had missed before.  If an ant colony has a prey item they are hauling back to the nest along a narrow path, they don't form two lanes; they form three.  The ants with food returning home get the central lane, the empty-handed out-bounders go to either side.  If you think it over, that makes complete sense they would evolve that way.

Were I to repeat the experiment, I might try to create a three-hole bridge with the center hole larger.

Bees: those gals get all the breaks.  They can fly, they can make honey.  Live in a clean environment, and eat flower pollen.  They can sting (once.)  They are even very beautiful bugs.  Now we learn they learn.  Bees have it all.

spike