EiS Short: Bees—Smart Like Us?

from Everything is Somewhere Podcast Hosted by The American Surveyor

The honeybee hive mind is one of the most sophisticated thinking machines on the planet, and even compares favorably with the thinking machine between our ears. Hives store 50 pounds of honey in a season. To do this, hive workers complete about 4 million foraging trips, flying a total of 12 million miles. They systematically find dozens or hundreds of food patches, exploit them, and move on. This is sophisticated stuff, requiring coordination at a level of complexity approaching that of a human corporation. In fact, bee intelligence is even capable of solving a mathematical series; in one experiment, entomologists placed a bowl of sugar water outside a hive. Bees quickly found it. The next day, the bowl was moved twice as far away. Again, the bowl was found. This went on for several days, with the bowl being moved away from the hive in a geometric, not arithmetic progression. The experiment was supposed to study search efficiency, but after several days something unexpected occurred; when the experimenters went to place the bowl, the bees had anticipated them and were already on the spot! This is astonishing. There are, frankly, plenty of humans who have trouble with geometric progressions. How is it even possible for a hive to make this sort of calculation?