[ExI] Bees are clever!

[Michael Roberts]

Not to mention the collective intelligence and social aspects ...

http://intelligence.seti.org/pages/social_insects

I recently went to a workshop with Michael Thiel:

http://gaiabees.com/

He would have you believe it extends far beyond current science.  YMMV
with this depending on your beliefs and tolerance for "trippy shit".

I'll also leave this here (some speculation on the waggle dance and
similarity with projections of quantum manifold structures) :

http://apisuk.com/Bees/2013/09/research-%E2%80%93-mysterious-%E2%80%9Cquantum%E2%80%9D-dance-of-the-bees/

MR

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 4:31 AM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Two articles about bee cognition.
> <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/2015/04/20/inside-the-wonderful-world-of-bee-cognition-how-it-all-began/>
> <http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/2015/04/20/inside-the-wonderful-world-of-bee-cognition-where-were-at-now/>
>
> Quotes:
> bees are capable of learning which flowers offer good nectar rewards
> based on floral features such as colour, smell, shape, texture,
> pattern, temperature and electric charge. They do this through
> associative learning: learning that a 'conditioned stimulus' (for
> example, the colour yellow) is associated with an 'unconditioned
> stimulus' (nectar). Learning simple associations like these is the
> basis of all learning - pretty much all animals do it, from humans to
> the sea slug which doesn't even have a brain.
>
> Instead a bee might have to learn 'blue flowers have better nectar
> than yellow flowers, but only in the morning' or 'this particular
> species of blue flower which also has a specific smell has better
> nectar than yellow flowers, but another species of blue flower has
> worse nectar'.
> Honeybees can indeed learn more complex relationships like this.
>
> However, honeybees' and bumblebees' cognitive abilities go beyond
> these examples of simply learning about their worlds, be it under a
> number of complex conditions. One excellent study showed that bees
> could actually form abstract concepts about their world. Having an
> abstract concept is the ability to understand a general fact about the
> way things are and to being able to generalise that fact to new
> situations you might encounter, as opposed to learning relationships
> that only hold in one particular situation.
> (Complex experiment then described).
> ---------------
>
> Pretty good for such a tiny processor.  :)
>
>
> BillK
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