Current Events > Bees have overtaken Great Apes as most intelligent animals

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-asked-leading-entomologists-whats-the-smartest-bug-in-the-world

are able to recognize and distinguish between human faces, a surprising trait given that it isnt really necessary for their survival. Another one: bees can count. In an experiment, honey bees were rewarded for stopping at the third in a series of landmarks, and proved able to remember this location and to thus count. (The distance was altered, while keeping the same number of landmarks, to discourage the bees from using their sense of distance.) Further study indicated their maximum counting abilities go to about four.

But perhaps the best-known and most insane bit of intelligence from bees is whats known as the waggle dance. This is a method of communication that the bee uses to tell other bees in the hive the location of a flower or source of food. Heres how it works: a bee performs the dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. The dance is shaped like a coffee bean: roughly, an oval with a line down the middle. Dancing straight up means to fly in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and left and right mean to fly to the left or the right of the sun.
The bee travels in a figure-eight pattern, tracing the line in the middle before performing the loops around the outside of the coffee bean shape. The amount of time it takes the bee to make its circuit around the outside of the coffee bean tells other bees how far away the food source is: a one-second loop means, roughly, that the food source is a kilometer away. The longer the loop, the farther away the food source is.
The bee will repeat this dance many times to indicate the quality of the food source: a really great one will find the bee doing this over and over again, yelling ITS A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, ITS A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE, ITS A KILOMETER NORTHWEST OF HERE for minutes on end. A decent but not quite as good source might find the bee repeating the message only a few times.

The honey bee dance is unique insomuch as theyre using symbols, says Chittka. No other animal besides humans has that. Even other primates dont use symbols: an ape like a chimpanzee may point at a desired object, or lead others to it, but it wont use an abstract symbol or message to indicate what it wants to convey. The honey bees waggle dance is a wildly intelligent attribute; it enables a bee to very efficiently convey detailed information to a large group, and also can be done in the safety of the hive, where other animals cant overhear.
These behaviors are far above and beyond what most people would assume an insect is capable of. Without exaggerating, the honey bee is capable of advanced symbolic communication, language, facial recognition, number use, observation and mimicry, understanding of rules, and high-level problem-solving. They are, in some senses, significantly smarter than many mammals. Amazing.

Helpful if for the next time you'll think twice if you're going to be a jerk to a bee.

HiddenRoar posted...

Helpful if for the next time you'll think twice if you're going to be a jerk to a bee.

Extremely. I can always tell the bee I will give them 5 but just give them 4.

does anyone remember that goosebumps book where the kid gets turned into a bee and he stings someone and he starts to die

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Humans are also great apes, they would have to surpass us too.

CoolMaskGuy posted...

Humans are also great apes, they would have to surpass us too.

I think bees are already smarter than some of us, tbh.

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Bees don't bug me. It's wasp. Fuck those things. I will burn every nest I stumble across.

Master_Bass posted...

I think bees are already smarter than some of us, tbh.

sex the queen and eat flowers, lot better than most of us are doing

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Abiz_ posted...

Bees don't bug me. It's wasp. Fuck those things. I will burn every nest I stumble across.

Apparently wasps also remember faces.

HiddenRoar posted...

Apparently wasps also remember faces.

That guy in Florida who ate the wasp nest better watch his back.

HiddenRoar posted...

Apparently wasps also remember faces.

Real shit there was this wasp I was trying to kill once and failed, next day the same motherfucker comes back and instantly tries to sting me through the screened door in my back yard, it was sitting there and just looking at me and trying to get in. I ended up winning that battle but at that moment I realized I had my first legitimate enemy.

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https://www.popsci.com/brainy-bumblebees-can-push-balls-into-goal/#page-2

Bees can play football (soccer, for Americans)

In the study, researchers tested bumblebee intelligence by teaching them to play a rudimentary version of single-player soccer. A bee pushed a bee-sized ball into a goal area in the center of a circular pattern in order to get a reward of sugar water. They learned fast.
[...]
This is far removed from anything they have ever seen or had to do. There are no flowers that require a bee to move a ball or moving object in with them, says study co-author Clint Perry.
[...]
For me, the social dimension of it; that the bees can learn this non-natural task better when it is demonstrated, is almost more interesting than the fact that theyre learning a non-natural task itself, Couvillion says. In the study, the bees learned how to move the ball more quickly when they were shown a model plastic bee moving the ball, and faster still when a bee that had already been trained showed the newcomer the ropes.
The social learning shows how knowledgeeven involving a new technique or skillcan be quickly transmitted from bee to bee.
Not that bees arent smart on their own. There were a few phenomenal bees who figured out what to do as the experiment was first being demonstrated to them.
[...]
Many of the bees also managed to demonstrate their smarts by improving on the techniques displayed to them. While demonstrator bees and models always started with the ball furthest from the newbie bee, when faced with a choice of balls, the bees didnt automatically gravitate towards the one theyd witnessed moving in the demonstration. Instead, they took a risk and went for the ball closest to them. They were also able to solve the puzzle even if the balls were a different color.
[...]
While bee brains are orders of magnitude smaller than human brainsa million neurons to over 100 billion neuronsthey can still solve problems quickly, even in very unfamiliar circumstances.

A bee's brain is the size of a sesame seed, for reference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

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If bees are so smart why aren't they wearing masks?
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Has anyone told the Sayians yet? It makes sense though. Bee's wouldn't have let the moon get blown up.
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HiddenRoar posted...

The bee travels in a figure-eight pattern, tracing the line in the middle before performing the loops around the outside of the coffee bean shape. The amount of time it takes the bee to make its circuit around the outside of the coffee bean tells other bees how far away the food source is: a one-second loop means, roughly, that the food source is a kilometer away. The longer the loop, the farther away the food source is.

They can't be that intelligent, they're using the METRIC system.

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This is what wipes us out. This is our extinction event.

We don't have to worry about a virus, or rouge AI, an asteroid, etc.

Super Intelligent Bees will be our undoing, and what's worse we made them that way.

Then they join forces with the Murder Hornets.

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Strider102 posted...

Super Intelligent Bees will be our undoing, and what's worse we made them that way.

So long as they don't figure out metallurgy, we should be okay.

Questionmarktarius posted...

So long as they don't figure out metallurgy, we should be okay.

We deserve our fate if we allow that to happen.

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Smarter than half the people I see

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