Posted on 06/11/2018 5:35:43 AM PDT by ETL
Dolphins, African gray parrots and nonhuman primates ..understand the idea of "zero," but researchers were surprised to find that honeybees also comprehend this concept, considering the insects' tiny brains, according to a statement from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
Honeybees have fewer than 1 million neurons, compared with the 86 billion neurons in humans — and yet, they grasp a concept that humans, by some measures, don't start to understand before preschool, according to NPR.
The researchers set up two cards, each of which had a set of symbols on them, like triangles or circles. Then, they trained a group of the bees to fly to the card with the lower number of symbols. (The bees quickly learned what the humans wanted them to do to get their delicious, sugary rewards).
The trained bees were then shown a card that was empty versus one that had symbols on it. Without any prior training, the bees flew more often to the empty card — thereby demonstrating that they understood that "zero" was a number less than the others, according to the study, which was published Thursday ..in the journal Science.
Although they flew more often to an empty card than to one that had one symbol on it, it became easier for them to differentiate when the symbols' card increased in number. For example, they more often flew to the zero when the other card had four symbols than when it had one, according to NPR.
Perhaps these findings will shed light on the brain mechanism behind what allows us to understand the concept of "nothing," Adrian Dyer, a researcher at RMIT University and senior author of the study, said in the RMIT statement. This understanding, in turn, could help in the development of artificial intelligence that also understands this concept.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Thanks for the link and also love your bee with glasses :D!
“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” – Archilochus
Honeybees Know a Lot About Nothing
An alternative theory would be that the bees were flying to the card with the most uniform coloring.
The card with the fewest symbols on it would be the card most uniform in color.
So bees are smarter than liberals, who have no understanding of math at all.
Bees got plenty of nothin’, and nothin’s plenty for bees...
I took up beekeeping as a hobby last year. It is a fascinating experience.
My hive this year is booming and will have to add in another deep and split my colony into two.
It took humans awhile to recognize zero in their counting systems. From Wiki:
Ancient Egyptian numerals were base 10. They used hieroglyphs for the digits and were not positional. By 1770 BC, the Egyptians had a symbol for zero in accounting texts. The symbol nfr, meaning beautiful, was also used to indicate the base level in drawings of tombs and pyramids and distances were measured relative to the base line as being above or below this line.
If you provide them with food they seek when they land on the card of your choice, you have done nothing but let them find the exact color of flower that renders the most pollen or nectar.
And your blank cards and ones with symbols and numbers on them look nothing like what you would expect a bee to be looking at for food. They dont even see flowers the same way we do. What do these cards look like under UV light? that will tell you more about what the bee is thinking because its not a plain white paper card to her.
What we see on the left. What the bee sees onthe right.
You would not believe how many people have argued with me that it is possible to divide by zero. I love the debates over what nothing actually means. How many nothings can you have? Is zero infinite? If I put zero into something is the next zero unique or the same?
I guess Howard Hecuba was a liberal since he didn’t bring the Honeybees under contract from Gilligan’s Island.
A guy here does the bee thing and is apparently doing well.
Well, maybe not quite. A white card with fewer symbols (0 included) is brighter than one with more symbols. If bees are responding to brightness differences, then no concept of 0 is necessary. Newborn babies by the way do respond to differences in brightness and the greater the difference, the more likely or more intense the response.
Yes. This crossed my mind as well. It was certainly another variable that needs to be tested in the future if they are to solidify the first theory.
Fantastic!!! Keep up the great work!! :D
I always thought the concept of zero was invented in India. Turns out it was in the beehive. Now I understand why marxist workers get the social doctrine of nothing for all.
Were they Asian bees?
A lot of Americans have no concept of zero, but voted for him anyway...
...twice!
The claim presented is that the bees recognized the absence of marks without prior training. Unfortunately the article doesn't really go into how the experiment was set up, or whether it was repeatable, or what theories of variation were tested. So it's more of a conversational factoid. I hate science news that has the intellectual depth of Cosmo sex surveys...
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