{"id":8619,"date":"2017-03-18T10:44:23","date_gmt":"2017-03-18T15:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=8619"},"modified":"2017-03-18T10:44:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-18T15:44:23","slug":"and-who-brought-the-tape-measure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/03\/18\/and-who-brought-the-tape-measure\/","title":{"rendered":"And Who Brought The Tape Measure?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It sounds like a silly experiment, but the results are fascinating. NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (4 March 2017) reports<\/a> that you can train bees<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IT\u2019S a hole-in-one! Bumblebees have learned to push a ball into a hole to get a reward, stretching what small-brained creatures were thought capable of.<\/p>\n

Previous studies showed that bees could do smart things to objects directly attached to a food reward, such as pulling a string to get at food<\/a>. Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London and his team decided the next challenge was to get bees to learn to move an object not attached to a reward.<\/p>\n

They built a circular platform with a small hole in the centre filled with sugar solution, into which bees had to move a ball to get a reward. A researcher showed them how to do this by using a plastic bee on a stick to push the ball.<\/p>\n

The bees did learn, and even minimised the effort needed by choosing the ball closest to the hole (Science<\/i>, doi.org\/bz98<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the abstact of the academic article<\/a> in Science<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

Bees that observed demonstration of the technique from a live or model demonstrator learned the task more efficiently than did bees observing a \u201cghost\u201d demonstration (ball moved via magnet) or without demonstration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not entirely certain if this suggests a limitation of the bee’s cognitive abilities – it has to see a creature just like it in order to recognize its own potentiality – or a demonstration that it can recognize a creature like itself, which seems unremarkable. The first link in the article selection, above, is to a video of the bees demonstrating their string pulling ability, a\u00a0 previous achievement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It sounds like a silly experiment, but the results are fascinating. NewScientist (4 March 2017) reports that you can train bees: IT\u2019S a hole-in-one! Bumblebees have learned to push a ball into a hole to get a reward, stretching what small-brained creatures were thought capable of. Previous studies showed that \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8620,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8619\/revisions\/8620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}