Bees get pessimistic

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ScienceDaily (June 3, 2011) — When people are depressed or anxious, they are much more likely to see their glass as half empty than half full. In tough times, evidence of that same pessimistic outlook can be seen in dogs, rats, and birds. Now, researchers reporting online on June 2 in Current Biology, show that bees, too, share those very same hallmarks of negative emotion.

"We have shown that the emotional responses of bees to an aversive event are more similar to those of humans than previously thought," said Geraldine Wright of Newcastle University. "Bees stressed by a simulated predator attack exhibit pessimism mirroring that seen in depressed and anxious people."

"In other words," added study first author Melissa Bateson, "the stressed bee's glass is half empty."

But, they say, that isn't the same as saying that bees consciously experience emotions in the way that we do. On that point, the jury is still out.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602122248.htm

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1. Bees use quantum technology, sertov.

http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263

Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret.

This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. I grew up thinking about bees, she says. My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee’s dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey. Her father kept his books on honeybees on a shelf in her room. I’m not sure why, she says. It may have just been a convenient space. I remember looking at a lot of these books, especially the one by Karl von Frisch.

Von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn’t been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb, which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a waggle dance, which in outline looks something like a coffee bean--two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.

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