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Bees Solve Problem
With a PhD in pollination biology, Dr Nigel Raine has always been interested in bees, and in exploring why particular animals do certain things. So it was no surprise that Dr Raine, from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London – and research colleagues Professor Lars Chittka and Dr Mathieu Lihoreau from Queen Mary, University of London – discovered that bees can resolve a problem that occupies computers for days.
‘Bees are crucial pollinators for one-in-three mouthfuls of food that we eat,’ says Dr Raine. ‘One crucial thing is how they move around the landscape and take the pollen between the flowers.’ The team wanted to look at the bees’ routes between flowers, and how efficient they used energy. They conducted the experiment in a modified greenhouse on the roof of Queen Mary, using artificial flowers and a reservoir of nectar. They trained an individual bee to visit all the flowers in one location at the same time and as the bee became experienced, they recorded how she flew around and returned home with the nectar. They arranged the flowers differently, looking at how the routes changed. Previously it had been suggested that the bees simply plot a route in the order of where they found the flowers. ‘We set up the flowers,’ explains Dr Raine, ‘in a way such that if they followed the flowers in the order that they discovered them, the bees would follow a very long and circuitous path, much longer than needed. We wanted to see if they could actually find a shorter path and indeed they did.’
Bees on honey cells © Irina Tischenko - iStockphoto
This is analogous to a mathematical problem called the ‘travelling salesman problem’. A salesman travelling to different places needs to travel efficiently using the shortest travel time. When visiting many places, ‘there is no elegant simple mathematical solution. You calculate the length of all possible routes and then say which is the shortest.’ A computer can calculate this but the experiment shows bees can too with a tiny little brain. ‘What would be of wider interest to people if we can understand how the bees are actually solving this problem.’ Solving it would aid our understanding for communication networks such as rerouting traffic, and specifically would fill out our ecological knowledge of how pollen is moved around.
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