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# 2020-08-30 - The Honey Bee by James L. Gould & Carol Grant Gould
This book was given to me as a gift. I appreciated the writing and
learned a few things. Toward the end, the book became less
interesting because it read more like a technical manual on the inner
workings of the bee body-mind. Below are some excerpts from the book.
We are normally blind to ultraviolet because of a faint yellowish
pigment in our cornea; people who have had their corneas removed can
see ultraviolet light, though they experience it as blue rather than
as a separate color.
The [bee] sensitivity to polarized light, which von Frisch did not
discover until the late 1940s, has its own particular use: there is
an elaborate and beautiful pattern of polarized light in the sky,
visible to us only through filters, that enables bees to find their
way when the sun is hidden behind clouds.
One ability we lack is the capacity to sense the earth's magnetic
field. Bees are more sensitive to this mysterious force than any
other species that we know of.
This strategy, by which a behavior is controlled by the careful
balancing of two opposing forces, is common in our own bodies.
Virtually every movement of a finger or limb is tempered by muscles
pulling in the opposite direction; this gives us more precise control
of our actions than we would have otherwise. Some hormones
circulating in the blood have antagonistic effects, and it is the
balance between the two at any given moment that determines the net
response. The idea that all the bees in a hive work in concert in a
common effort to achieve a single goal, then, is a myth. The
ambivalence of individual bees and the differences of opinion between
workers is highly adaptive: it allows for faster, more flexible and
finely graded control than would be possible if all acted with one
mind.
The dance communication system is called a language because it
satisfies all the intuitive criteria that have been posited for a
true language. [It encodes distance based on effort, and direction
based on the position of the sun.]
The existence of dialects in the bee language, however, does not mean
that the language is learned: honey bees reared in isolation from
dancers can perform correctly oriented dances after their first
foraging discovery and correctly interpret the dances of others from
the outset. When pupae of one race are put into a colony of another,
they dance as adults using their own race's conversion factor, having
learned nothing from the dances of their foster sisters; bees of
difference races simply misunderstand each other's dances.
A series of such experiments convinced von Frisch that there is no
correlate for altitude in the dance.
In sum, then, a forager forms her own judgment about food quality,
considering the concentration, viscosity, and weight of the nectar,
the distance to and feel of the flower, and the nature of the patch;
in the hive she then listens to the "applause" of the unloaders and
factors this in as well. With these two sets of opinions, the bee
then chooses whether or not to dance. This use of subjective
criteria and audience feedback, then, results in a recruitment system
that is extremely sensitive to the needs of the hive and the
contingencies of the moment.
[Experienced bees, when transported in the dark away from their home,
can find their way back by recognizing landmarks. This shows that
they have some kind of memory and mental map. They can also dance
directions to the feeder they were transported to, even though they
never flew to there from the hive before.]
On short, the cavity nesters dancing in the dark, have sound in their
dance, while the open nesters do not. ... These differences all add
up to one conclusion: open nesters depend more on vision, and
attenders observe the raised abdomen of the dancer as she performs;
in cavities, visual information is gone, and sound has evolved to
replace it.
author: Gould, James L., 1945-
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/James_L._Gould
LOC: QL568.A6 G68
tags: book,non-fiction,science
title: The Honey Bee
# Tags
book
non-fiction
science
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