Stress and feelings
Georgina Grell
Thursday, March 2, 2017
I was fascinated recently by a video clip of a bee being trained to play football. A fake bee was used to show a real bee how to move the ball in exchange for a drop of sugar. Once the bee had learned this rewarding move it was then able to show another bee how to move the ball, and when given a choice of ball would always go for the nearest one requiring least work even when the bee that had been observed had been forced to move one further away (Loukola et al, 2017). It is not new that bees can communicate with one another — successful honey bee foragers use waggle dances to tell nestmates the direction and distance of profitable flower patches — but this study has shown that the bee's ability to learn is more sophisticated than previously thought.
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