Serving Zion
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Here's a neat wee article I found today:
www.sciencealert.com
I especially like how the lady is giggling because she thinks it's cute that two little honey bees are taking the lid off the fanta bottle (and it is cute because we all love honey bees!), but I'm irked a bit by the way humans are amazed at this - as though they think the bees are supremely intelligent for doing it, and trying to understand how a bee with a brain only the size of a pin prick could be so clever.
One person has tweeted "how do they know that it needs to be screwed anti-clockwise?" And that really got me thinking because it's a valid question. Or is it? Sure the cap does need to go anti-clockwise in order to come off the bottle, but does the bee need to know that the cap needs to go anti-clockwise in order to turn it?
And keeping in mind we only see three or four seconds of the bees at work - how can we bee sure that they didn't turn it the wrong way at first? And how long it took them to do it we don't know.
See, the reason it irks me, is this isn't such a demonstration of the bee's intelligence, it's the proof of the lack of intelligence of the humans who are amazed that the bees are so intelligent - and that in itself isn't enough to irk me, but it's the underlying condescension of their base belief that the bees are essentially stupid. But we already know that the bees aren't stupid: they know there's something sweet in the bottle and they know the sweetness is coming from the gap in the lid area, and they have noticed that the lid moves when they press on it and that increases the amount of sweetness they smell, so they're simply pressing on the lid in determination to see if they can't brute-force the lid to come off. That much is quite reliable fact, you can see it with your own eyes, but there's an additional fact that is encouraging them to pursue their goal:
We can be sure that they have experienced being inside discarded bottles where there's a residue of the drink left, and surely they have seen bottles with lids attached, so they know that the lid is able to be detached from the bottle.
If we want to speculate a little (and it's a level of speculation that I can accept), I would not be surprised if they also remember having seen humans detach the lids from bottles - and therefore they know it is possible to remove the lid. I think the bees have that much awareness because I have observed that they reason as such.
What's happening here is that the lady has started to train the bees to open bottles by giving them a task that can be accomplished quite easily, then if she continues, they might learn the pattern.
But why does everybody leap in hysteria and amazement at this? It's only the given situation that in this case the bees were determined to get to the sweets and they had to force their way in. I just, really, do hope to see that the humans themselves might evolve one day to be worthy of the intelligence they claim to have. I think that also has to be trained into them somehow by someone.
'Unbelievable' Video Shows Two Bees Work Together to Unscrew a Soda Bottle
While we all recognize bees for their importance in our food chain as pollinators, the clever creatures have a series of other talents, including math ability, face recognition, and even tool use. A new video, originally posted on Twitter, shows a pair of bees apparently unscrewing the orange...
www.sciencealert.com
I especially like how the lady is giggling because she thinks it's cute that two little honey bees are taking the lid off the fanta bottle (and it is cute because we all love honey bees!), but I'm irked a bit by the way humans are amazed at this - as though they think the bees are supremely intelligent for doing it, and trying to understand how a bee with a brain only the size of a pin prick could be so clever.
One person has tweeted "how do they know that it needs to be screwed anti-clockwise?" And that really got me thinking because it's a valid question. Or is it? Sure the cap does need to go anti-clockwise in order to come off the bottle, but does the bee need to know that the cap needs to go anti-clockwise in order to turn it?
And keeping in mind we only see three or four seconds of the bees at work - how can we bee sure that they didn't turn it the wrong way at first? And how long it took them to do it we don't know.
See, the reason it irks me, is this isn't such a demonstration of the bee's intelligence, it's the proof of the lack of intelligence of the humans who are amazed that the bees are so intelligent - and that in itself isn't enough to irk me, but it's the underlying condescension of their base belief that the bees are essentially stupid. But we already know that the bees aren't stupid: they know there's something sweet in the bottle and they know the sweetness is coming from the gap in the lid area, and they have noticed that the lid moves when they press on it and that increases the amount of sweetness they smell, so they're simply pressing on the lid in determination to see if they can't brute-force the lid to come off. That much is quite reliable fact, you can see it with your own eyes, but there's an additional fact that is encouraging them to pursue their goal:
We can be sure that they have experienced being inside discarded bottles where there's a residue of the drink left, and surely they have seen bottles with lids attached, so they know that the lid is able to be detached from the bottle.
If we want to speculate a little (and it's a level of speculation that I can accept), I would not be surprised if they also remember having seen humans detach the lids from bottles - and therefore they know it is possible to remove the lid. I think the bees have that much awareness because I have observed that they reason as such.
What's happening here is that the lady has started to train the bees to open bottles by giving them a task that can be accomplished quite easily, then if she continues, they might learn the pattern.
But why does everybody leap in hysteria and amazement at this? It's only the given situation that in this case the bees were determined to get to the sweets and they had to force their way in. I just, really, do hope to see that the humans themselves might evolve one day to be worthy of the intelligence they claim to have. I think that also has to be trained into them somehow by someone.
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