Bees ‘get’ addition and subtraction, new study suggests

ScienceMag.org ^ | Feb. 6, 2019 | Alex Fox

[AndyJackson]

One Zebra - food. A hundred zebra - mass confusion.

[blueunicorn6]

Bees playing with their balls.

Filthy, stinking, lewd bee scientists!

[blueunicorn6]

Yep.

I snuck in a bee in my pocket to help me on my Algebra final.

Turns out all he really knew was Geometry, so I got an F.

And then he stung me.

[CrazyIvan]

“Ten bucks says that a lion can tell if there’s one wildebeest or four.”

I read an article in an outdoor magazine years ago by a guy who hunted crows. He claimed that crows could watch five or six hunters go into a blind and would not get close until that number had left.

[ETL]

[blueunicorn6]

Yeah, they just count the legs and divide by four.

[Trot]

As for crows, there are some videos on youtube where they’re tested for solving puzzles. The results are stunning!

[fieldmarshaldj]

*ping*

[EinNYC]

I used to teach about the language of bees when I taught high school zoology. I made up a bio-skit for my students to act out. One student was to perform either the waggle dance or the figure 8 dance authentically, in an attempt to show his hive of teammates where the flower I had hidden in the classroom was. If his hive was able to find the flower, they were exempt for homework for a week. If he couldn't find it, the other team got a crack at it. It was a bit of a tug of war to get the guys to wear bee antennae (mounted on hard plastic headbands), but they eventually goodnaturedly put them on. We all wore them, including me. It was really fun, and certainly drove home the info about bee dances in an engaging way.

But you should have been there when the principal dropped in, and saw all these tough inner city kids wearing bee antennae and weaving and turning in circles. He didn't have any idea what was going on, his jaw dropped open. Of course, this was in the golden days of teaching, when it was still fun---before Bloomberg started micromanaging and inserting all the PC garbage into the deal. That man could ruin a 3 year old's birthday party, regulating the size of birthday cake portions, the height of the candles on the cake, which songs could be sung and which games could be played.

[trebb]

Too funny (the pics)
I wonder how they presented the colors - all blue together and all yellow together or intermixed. My mind says it may be more a recognition of different sizes rather than a number calculation....but what do I know, I would have never thought of trying to prove bees can do basic math.

[ETL]

Lol! Thanks for sharing that.

Yes, it was a different world then.

No transgender bathrooms yet.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks fieldmarshaldj. That's the buzz.

[bert]

As a beekeeper and observer of bees for 20 years I am convinced that until we learn to communicate with bees, we can forget communicating with ET