Srimad-Bhagavatam, 8.1.11: […] “The Supreme Lord, the Personality of Godhead, has provided these necessities of life for the birds and bees, why not for mankind? There is no need for economic development; everything is provided.”
Bee Celestial Navigation and Non-Human Intelligence
Laurance R. Doyle: Many remarkable experiments have been done with bees over the past hundred years—how they use polarized light to see the Sun on a cloudy day, how they can understand the landscape as a map and so don’t need to follow the same route back to the hive that they took going out, how they know where the Sun is even after it sets and so can forage during a full Moon, and many more.
But I was particularly intrigued by a serendipitous experiment I read about recently that occurred when some university scientists were training bees to go farther and farther away for nectar so they could determine the precision of their navigational directions to each other. They placed some nectar close to the hive and then moved it out 25% farther every day until, after a while, the nectar source was quite far away. This required quite precise directions from the scout bees to the others in order to allow them to find a spot this far away—in other words, the angle of the waggle dance had to be smaller the farther the distance.
They were doing this experiment, which had been going on for many days, when the professor got a call from his graduate student. The student’s car had broken down so he had been unable to re-place the nectar source the extra 25% farther that morning. The professor said he would do it, then, that afternoon.
When the professor arrived at the nectar source there were no bees present. But when he arrived at the place where the nectar should have been for that day (but had not been moved there yet), there were all the bees waiting for him! Not only had the bees gotten the math correct (25% farther), but the implication is that they had demonstrated the imagination to be able to picture the future by picturing the nectar—not where it was—but where it was going to be! The professor wrote that he would never have done such an experiment on purpose since he never would have thought that the bees could have been so intelligent!
Besides basically doing all the work to bring us fruits, vegetables, and other pollination-requiring plants – plus honey and beeswax – bees remind us not to underestimate the expression of intelligence from any of our fellow (or, in this case, our lady) species. So to bee or not to bee is not the question. We have to bee, and we should be grateful to have such reliable, symbiotic friends to share our planet with.
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