True Facts: Bees That Play With Balls And Do Math!

this episode sponsored by brilliant learn to think if you've ever seen a bee you've probably noticed that they're not the largest of animals and thusly are endowed with a brain suitable for their smallness here it is the brain of a bee I mean honestly it looks fairly large on the screen like that but this Xbox controller which is apparently what controls a bee only has around 960,000 neurons in it compare that to the 100 billion or so neurons in a human brain brain you see that right there no well that's the B brain to scale anyway with stats like that you might expect a bee to suck its Scrabble which they do but they can remember the directions to a flower a mile away not sure I could do that and they can learn which flowers have the good sauce this bee right here for example learned that those yellow third grade arts and crafts flowers had the better nectar to drink while the blue ones had the better pollen to rub all over it's the best day of that pipe cleaner's life I know what you're thinking big deal learning to tell flowers apart is like the main Business of Being a bee of course they're going to toss a couple hundred th000 neurons at something important like that but what about if things get a bit more complicated see this Puck well in the middle of this Puck there's a divot with some sugar juice in it and bees they love the sugar juice now of course if you put a cap over top that Sugar juice you get some bummed out bees but if you take that cap and cover just a little bit of that food hole and then each time the bee comes back you cover it up a little bit more until it's totally covered you get some bees that maybe complain on Yelp about the restaurant going to but also bees that gradually figure out that you can push that cap out the way and once you light that fire some of them really get into the pushing all right Millie you did it you can stop now pretty clever these bees but if you train them on a different shaped cap and then present them with both kinds of caps they'll push the shape they were trained on first regardless of which one is covering up the sugar hole so they're learning but they're not quite getting the full picture but pushing things out the way is pretty normal for a bee flowers like that of the black locust don't just give up the pollen you have to force it open so what about learning something new that doesn't involve pushing here you have some flowers I'm doing air quotes they've got a hole in the Middle with sugar in it and the whole thing is under a clear cover but there's a string attached that you can pull to get at it now you give this setup to a bunch of bumblebees and not much happens a lot of buzzing around I mean might be because the flowers look like crap didn't even draw petals on them I know it scientists didn't have the balls to go to art school but still anyway you might find a rare bee the one in a 100 sort of thing that can figure this thing out on the first go but you know those kind of bees getting drunk the night before the SAT sort of bees but most of the rest of us sorry them need a little help but what you can do is train them by gradually pushing the flow under the cover and that way they learn to pull on the string to get the juice not bad right and listen once they learn it they're Champs at it I mean you want to give them a job but look at this you take another bee that doesn't know how to do it put that be in a box and let it watch the train B pull the string now let that be out the box and you know what itd fraking learn by watching now the train B can still do some things that this one can't like if you add extra strings so the flower doesn't move right away the train B keeps pulling until it works the one who learned by watching just kind of gives up so some things aren't getting across but in this way they can teach each other some very complex things here's a bee trained to do a two-step puzzle where you only get the reward at the end and again another bee can learn just by watching looks like a bit of an annoying student like gets right up in the oh now he's gone for a vape all right I'm back blue thing red thing got it I know what you're thinking what about balls listen what you've heard is true bees love balls like before I even show you stuff about how smart they are you should know that bees bees really love balls if you make a clear path from a bees nest to food nothing in the way but to get there the bees have to walk past what is essentially a b-size Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit they stop and they play with those freaking balls not for some reward or anything like that they play with balls so it's not surprising that you can train a bee to play one round of mini golf and look at how they train them with a little bee puppet on a stick and when they put the ball in the middle they get a sugar snack and they eventually you get the hang of it look at this one she throws it so hard she does a somersault and she's like come on it hit the middle where's my sugar anyway now you have the train be teach a novice bee how to put the ball in a hole but this time you have three balls and the two closest ones are glued down so it has to use the farthest one now you let the novice be try it on its own and you don't glue down any of the balls and you know what it uses the ball that was closest to the middle the one that gets you the treat the fastest even though it was trained on a different ball that's Innovation now this allows knowledge to spread through an entire Colony bees teaching other bees that's what this shows how that string pulling skill from before went from A to B to B to B if you like this show and you like to learn like the be do please go and check out brilliant.org brilliant is a free and easy way to learn math science and computer science they have been a longtime sponsor of true facts because I think they're great at teaching the course how technology works for example helps you understand things you interact with every day you can find out why the passwords you've been using aren't up to Snuff and how to craft a good one there's lessons on how recommendation algorithms work and why you suddenly see all those pingpong videos in your feed turns out there's lots of choices being made for you and then there's lessons on how to compress those pingpong videos to smaller file sizes without losing quality and if all this inspires you to switch careers well you can use brilliant to learn how how to code with courses like programming with python or thinking in code it's amazing to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org zfrank or click on the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription start learning get inspired check out brilliant today where were we oh right it makes sense that bees can share knowledge I mean bees are Social Butterflies well I mean they're bees but they all live together they have to have some complicated roommid meetings like who's going to get the groceries or in this example how to choose the location of a new home now out of 10,000 bees or so only a couple hundred of them are the scouts and the scouts go off and look for a good location maybe a nice hole now if they find something they come back with directions but they don't blam about it they do it through interpretive dance it's like if a mime had to give directions to the porta potty at Coachella here's how it works they do this sort of fig thing right and when they go through the center they shake their this already packs in a bunch of info it's like the morse code of twerking the direction they move in while they shake it corresponds to the direction of the location check it out they're doing this on a vertical surface the up Direction means straight towards the sun down is away from the Sun so this direction here is like 5:00 away from the Sun now the distance to the location is how long they shake it it's roughly 1,000 M for every second of shaking appar apply they bought into the metric system now you might be thinking how the hell do these bees know how far they flew well at one point they thought the bees were measuring the energy that they used to get there so they put tiny weights on the bees to see if it changed their estimates and you know what it mainly proved you shouldn't put weights on bees now there's a bunch of bees with muscular calves walking around another time they put these tents up as landmarks on the way from a hive to a feeder and then they changed the number of landmarks which seemed to confuse some of the be bees so what now bees can count well it seems they can especially lower numbers here's one avoiding four and landing on two here's one they taught to tell the difference between 11 and 12 you can give them two scenarios and train them to pick the larger one or the smaller one in this scenario look at it go back and forth just to be sure perfectionist B and if you train it on picking the larger number it won't just pick the one with more shapes it'll also pick one with the same number of shapes but where the shapes themselves are bigger it's like the concept of larger and look at this if you train them to pick the smaller thing they recognize that nothing is smaller than something I mean that's the concept of zero in this one if the B sees yellow shapes it's trained to go inside and look for the panel with one less than the number of shapes outside freaking subtraction if the color of the shapes is blue the be knows to add one to the number I mean they can do math you probably only knew about their spelling kill me but discret counting doesn't seem to be the thing that helps them judge distances instead they seem to use something called Optical flow which is kind of like the rate that things go by in your visual field and if you know that this is how bees measure things you can kind of screw with them you put them in a tunnel for example with stripes on the floor as it passes over the stripes it measures the distance and has an appropriate ax shaking now you do the same thing except in this one the stripes are moving so as the bee flies it thinks it's covering a hell of a lot more ground and it tells its buddies about a location that's miles away meanwhile you put a horizontal stripe and nothing changes while you fly over it they don't know how far they went and this explains by the way why bees will often drown if they fly over Still Water you can see this effect by using a mirror too the bee keeps getting closer to the ground to try and discern some movement but all there is is a reflection of a stationary bee so you can see it keeps bunking into the ground anyway in addition to distance and direction there's one more thing that seems to be communic ated in this dance the bee's estimate of how good the location is that it's found seems to be related to how often it does the dance in a row if it thinks it's found something great it just keeps going and then there's bees like this one that don't seem very enthused it flew like 3 ft and found a shoe now the reason for going on and on about a good location is because the bees eventually have to pick one location for the new home so these dances aren't just about the directions it's about marketing if you found found a good location you try and convince other Scouts to check it out and then dance like you do until there's enough to make the decision and listen since you've stayed around this long I'll tell you one other thing all of this communication about distance and location and quality mainly happen inside a hive in the dark mic drop a tiny little bee mic drop you think the bee you likes the honey no no no Be Love [Music] can't tempt to be with your money no no no Be Love [Music]

Channel: Ze Frank

Views: 990,813

Keywords: bees, bumblebee, honeybee, intelligence, cognition, math, play, true facts, ze frank

Id: M6hGjh9SJ_M

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024