Three Towns Forum

Members' Lounge => Science and Technology => Topic started by: Ian on September 02, 2020, 11:23:10 am

Title: Bee Keeping
Post by: Ian on September 02, 2020, 11:23:10 am
Honeybees can calculate probability, but it seems they don’t use it the same way we tend to.

Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues trained 20 honeybees to associate the colours of artificial flowers with the likelihood of obtaining sweet water. Over multiple sessions, they presented the bees with five colours in various combinations of two colours at a time. Each colour was ranked one to five. For each pair, only the higher-ranking colour dispensed sweetened water.

The researchers then tested the bees on a combination they hadn’t seen yet: the second and fourth-ranking colours, representing odds of getting sweetened water of 66 and 33 per cent, respectively.

You might think the best strategy for obtaining the treat would be to only visit flowers with the highest odds of delivering, but the bees did something different, says Barron. They matched the proportion of visits with the probability of getting sweet water, so for flowers with 66 per cent odds of sugar, they visited them roughly two-thirds of the time. This is known as probability matching.
Title: Re: Bee Keeping
Post by: Hugo on September 02, 2020, 12:30:30 pm
Coronavirus and Beekeepers
Title: Re: Bee Keeping
Post by: SteveH on September 02, 2020, 03:26:47 pm
Perfect ............   $yes$
Title: Re: Bee Keeping
Post by: DVT on September 02, 2020, 04:10:15 pm
Going back to the original posting, I have noticed that bees visiting my lawn are selective.

Apart from the obvious grass, we have daisies (white), buttercups (yellow) and clover (purple).

A bee that goes to a disy will move on to another daisy, and stick with daisies until he's had enough.  A bee that goes to a buttercup will stick to a buttercup until had enough.  Same with the bee visiting clover.  They don't mix their choices.

The daisy bee may well head towards a buttercup but does not land, turns and goes for a daisy.

I've no idea which flower contains the most sweet stuff - the choice could just be their favourite colour!
Title: Re: Bee Keeping
Post by: Ian on September 02, 2020, 06:25:59 pm
Same here. The hive intelligence is remarkable, though.
Title: Re: Bee Keeping
Post by: SteveH on March 11, 2024, 09:44:50 am
Theft of 140,000 honeybees sets alarm bells ringing in North Wales and points to painful truth
It was the second theft in the same area a little over two weeks apart

Unease and alarm has rippled through the beekeeping community in North Wales after successive thefts of valuable beehives. Raiders took hives and their bees from sites just two miles apart in Conwy and the expertise involved points to a fellow beekeeper.

In mid February three hives vanished from Glanwydden and in early March seven hives less than two miles away were stolen from Craigside by the Little Orme, Llandudno. The North Wales Police rural crime team is investigating and beekeepers have been warned to be extra vigilant.

cont https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/theft-140000-honeybees-sets-alarm-28789761?IYA-reg=49560bcd-5a9c-47f0-8fc5-ba2e71710589