True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math!

Ze Frank
25 Apr 202411:28

Summary

TLDRThe video script explores the surprising cognitive abilities of bees, highlighting their capacity to learn and remember complex tasks. Bees, despite having a brain with only around 960,000 neurons compared to the human brain's hundred billion, can remember the locations of flowers and differentiate nectar and pollen quality. They can also learn to solve problems, such as pushing caps off a sugar source or pulling a string to access sugar, and even pass on these learned behaviors to other bees through observation. The script also delves into bees' numerical understanding, their ability to perform basic arithmetic, and their use of optical flow to estimate distances. Furthermore, it describes the intricate communication methods bees employ, such as the waggle dance to convey information about food sources and potential new nest locations to their hive mates. The video emphasizes bees' social nature and their sophisticated problem-solving skills, which are often underestimated due to their small brain size.

Takeaways

  • 🧠 Bees have a relatively small brain with around 960,000 neurons, compared to the hundred billion neurons in the human brain.
  • 🐝 Despite their small brain size, bees can remember the locations of flowers up to a mile away and discern which flowers have better nectar or pollen.
  • 🧐 Bees can learn complex tasks, such as pushing a cap off a container to access sugar juice, and they can adapt to different shapes of caps.
  • 🔄 Bees exhibit problem-solving behavior and can learn new tasks by observing other bees, indicating a form of social learning.
  • 🌌 When presented with a new type of 'flower', some bees can learn to pull a string to access sugar, a behavior not naturally part of their repertoire.
  • 📉 Bees can understand numerical concepts, such as larger or smaller quantities, and even demonstrate an understanding of zero and subtraction.
  • 🏌‍♀ Bees can be trained to perform tasks like playing mini golf, suggesting they can learn to associate actions with rewards.
  • 🎟 Bees have a preference for balls and can be distracted by them, even when foraging for food.
  • 💃 Scout bees use a 'waggle dance' to communicate the direction, distance, and quality of a food source to other bees in the hive.
  • 📏 Bees estimate distance using optical flow, which is influenced by the rate that objects pass through their visual field.
  • 🚀 Bees can be innovative, as shown by a bee choosing the most efficient ball to reach a treat, even when it wasn't the one it was trained on.

Q & A

  • How many neurons are there in a bee's brain?

    -A bee's brain has around 960,000 neurons.

  • Compared to the human brain, how small is a bee's brain in terms of neurons?

    -The human brain has around a hundred billion neurons, which is significantly larger compared to the 960,000 neurons in a bee's brain.

  • What are bees capable of remembering despite their small brain size?

    -Bees can remember the directions to a flower a mile away and can learn which flowers have better nectar or pollen.

  • How do bees learn to solve a problem involving a covered sugar juice source?

    -Bees can learn to push a cap covering a sugar juice source out of the way by gradually having more of the food hole covered each time they return.

  • What does training bees on different shaped caps demonstrate about their learning capabilities?

    -Bees can learn to push the shape they were trained on first, even if it's not the one covering the sugar hole, indicating they are learning but not generalizing the concept.

  • How do bees learn to pull a string to access sugar under a clear cover?

    -Bees can be trained to pull a string to access sugar by gradually pushing the flower under the cover, and once learned, they become proficient at the task.

  • What is the significance of bees being able to learn by watching other trained bees?

    -It allows for the transmission of complex behaviors and skills within the bee colony, enhancing their collective problem-solving abilities.

  • What does the script suggest about bees' ability to understand numerical concepts?

    -Bees can count, especially with lower numbers, and understand concepts like larger, smaller, and even zero.

  • How do bees communicate the quality of a found location to other bees?

    -Bees use a form of interpretive dance to convey information about the direction, distance, and quality of a location. The frequency of the dance seems to indicate the quality of the location.

  • What is the concept of 'optical flow' that bees use to measure distances?

    -Optical flow is the rate at which objects pass through a bee's visual field. Bees use this to estimate the distance they have traveled.

  • How do bees handle situations where they cannot detect movement in their environment?

    -Bees may struggle to discern distance when there is no movement, such as over still water or a mirror, which can lead to behaviors like repeatedly bumping into the ground.

  • What is the primary motivation for bees playing with balls, as mentioned in the script?

    -Bees are naturally attracted to balls and will play with them without any apparent reward, suggesting an intrinsic motivation or enjoyment.

Outlines

00:00

🧠 Bee Brain Power and Learning

This paragraph discusses the cognitive abilities of bees despite their small brain size. It highlights that a bee brain, with around 960,000 neurons, is significantly smaller than the human brain but still allows them to remember flower locations and learn to distinguish between different types of flowers for nectar and pollen. Bees can also learn complex tasks, such as pushing a cap off a container to access sugar juice, and can even learn by observing other bees perform tasks. The paragraph also touches on bees' ability to learn and teach each other complex problem-solving skills, including pulling a string to access food and solving a two-step puzzle. It concludes with a humorous note about bees' love for balls and their playful nature.

05:01

🐝 Bee Communication and Knowledge Sharing

This paragraph explores how bees communicate and share knowledge within the colony. It explains that bees teach each other skills like string pulling, which can then be passed through the colony. The paragraph also promotes the learning platform Brilliant.org, which is described as a free and easy way to learn math, science, and computer science. It details how bees use a figure-eight dance to convey information about the direction and distance to a location, as well as the quality of the location. The dance's intensity and duration reflect the scout bee's enthusiasm for the location. The paragraph also delves into bees' numerical understanding, their ability to count and compare quantities, and their use of optical flow to estimate distances. It ends with a humorous line about the primary motivation of bees being their love for balls, not honey.

10:04

🏠 Bee Decision Making and Home Selection

This paragraph focuses on the decision-making process bees use to select a new home. It describes how scout bees find potential locations and then use a dance to convince other scouts to check it out. The more a bee dances, the more it is marketing the location as a good one. The paragraph emphasizes that the communication within the hive is complex and takes place in the dark, highlighting the sophistication of bee behavior. It concludes with a playful repetition of the theme that bees love balls, reinforcing the light-hearted tone of the script.

Mindmap

Keywords

💡Neurons

Neurons are the fundamental units of the nervous system, responsible for transmitting information through electrical and chemical signals. In the context of the video, the bee's brain is compared to the human brain in terms of the number of neurons, highlighting the remarkable cognitive abilities of bees despite their small brain size with 'only around 960,000 neurons'.

💡Memory

Memory is the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information. The video emphasizes the bee's memory capabilities, noting that 'they can remember the directions to a flower a mile away,' which is a significant ability for an animal with a brain as small as a bee's.

💡Learning

Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, or abilities through experience, study, or being taught. The script illustrates that bees can learn complex tasks such as pushing caps off a sugar source or pulling a string to access sugar, showcasing their learning capabilities beyond simple instinctual behaviors.

💡Innovation

Innovation refers to the creation of new methods, ideas, or products. The video uses the term to describe how a bee, after being trained on a specific ball for a mini golf task, innovates by choosing a different ball to achieve the goal faster, demonstrating a level of problem-solving and adaptation.

💡Social Learning

Social learning is the process of learning through observation and interaction with others. The video explains that bees can 'teach each other some very complex things' by observing trained bees perform tasks, highlighting the social aspect of their learning process.

💡Optical Flow

Optical flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects in a visual scene caused by the movement of the observer or the movement of objects within the scene. Bees use optical flow to estimate distances, as mentioned in the video when discussing how bees can be deceived by moving stripes or a mirror's reflection.

💡Waggle Dance

The waggle dance is a figure-eight movement performed by honey bees to communicate the location of a food source to other bees. The video describes this dance as a form of 'interpretive dance' where the direction and duration of the dance convey information about the direction and distance to the food source.

💡Pollination

Pollination is the transfer of pollen from male to female parts of a plant, often facilitated by animals like bees. While not explicitly mentioned, the video's discussion of bees' ability to remember flower locations and their preference for certain flowers alludes to their crucial role in pollination.

💡Interpretive Dance

Interpretive dance is a type of dance that emphasizes the expression of emotions and ideas rather than formalized steps. In the video, the term is used metaphorically to describe the waggle dance of bees, which communicates specific information about the location of food sources through the dance's pattern.

💡Bee Brain

The bee brain, despite its small size, is capable of complex cognitive tasks as discussed in the video. It serves as a central theme, emphasizing that 'the brain of a bee' can perform remarkable feats such as learning, memory, and even basic mathematical concepts, which challenges the viewer's perception of animal intelligence.

💡Brilliant.org

Brilliant.org is an online platform for learning math, science, and computer science. It is mentioned in the video as a sponsor and is used as an educational tool to help viewers understand various concepts, drawing a parallel between the learning process of bees and human learning on the platform.

Highlights

Bees have a small brain with around 960,000 neurons, compared to 100 billion in the human brain.

Despite their small brain, bees can remember the directions to a flower a mile away and learn which flowers have better nectar or pollen.

Bees can gradually learn to push a cap off a container with sugar juice, even if the cap is a different shape than they were trained on.

Bees can learn to pull a string to get sugar from a covered 'flower' by watching another bee do it.

Bees can be trained to do a two-step puzzle and teach it to another bee through observation.

Bees love playing with balls and can be trained to play a round of mini golf.

Bees can use the ball that gets to the treat the fastest, even if it wasn't the one they were trained on, showing innovation.

Bees can share knowledge and teach each other complex things, allowing information to spread through the colony.

Bee scouts search for a new home location and use a figure-eight 'waggle dance' to communicate the direction, distance and quality of the site to other bees.

The direction of the dance corresponds to the direction of the location, with up meaning towards the sun and down meaning away from it.

The duration of the shaking during the dance represents the distance to the location, roughly a thousand meters per second of shaking.

Bees can count, especially with lower numbers, and can be trained to choose the larger or smaller number of shapes.

Bees can perform basic math like subtraction and addition when choosing the number of shapes to go to.

Bees use optical flow, or the rate that things pass by in their visual field, to estimate distances rather than counting.

Bees can be tricked into thinking they traveled a longer distance if they pass over moving stripes in a tunnel.

Bees often drown if they fly over still water because they cannot detect movement to estimate the distance traveled.

The frequency of the waggle dance indicates the quality of the location the bee has found, with better sites inspiring more consecutive dances.

The waggle dance serves not just to give directions, but also to convince other scouts to check out and support the location for a new home.

All this communication about distance, direction and quality happens inside the dark hive through the bees' sophisticated system of dances.

Transcripts

00:00

This episode sponsored by Brilliant.

00:01

Learn to think.

00:04

If you've ever seen a bee, you've probably noticed that

00:06

they're not the largest of animals

00:08

and thusly are endowed with a brain suitable for their smallness-ness.

00:13

Here it is, the brain of a bee.

00:15

I mean, honestly, it looks fairly large on the screen like that,

00:18

but this Xbox controller, which is apparently what controls a bee,

00:22

only has around 960,000 neurons in it.

00:26

Compare that to the hundred billion or so neurons in the human brain.

00:30

You see that right there?

00:31

No? Well, that's the bee brain to scale.

00:34

Anyway, with stats

00:35

like that, you might expect a bee to suck at Scrabble, which they do,

00:39

but they can remember the directions to a flower a mile away.

00:42

I'm not sure I could do that.

00:44

And they can learn which flowers have the good sauce.

00:47

This bee right here, for example, learned that those yellow third

00:50

grade arts-and-crafts flowers had the better nectar to drink

00:54

while the blue ones had the better pollen to rub all over.

00:57

It’s the best day of that pipe cleaner’s life.

00:59

I know what you're thinking: Big deal.

01:02

Learning to tell flowers apart is like the main business of being a bee.

01:06

Of course, they're going to toss a couple

01:07

hundred thousand neurons at something important like that.

01:10

But what about if things get a bit more complicated?

01:13

See this puck? Well, in the middle of this, there's a pit with some sugar

01:16

juice in it and bees, they love the sugar juice.

01:20

Now, of course,

01:20

if you put a cap over top that sugar juice, you get some bummed out bees.

01:24

But if you take that cap and cover just a little bit of that food hole,

01:28

and then each time the bee comes back, you cover it up a little bit more

01:31

until it's totally covered.

01:33

You get some bees that maybe complain on Yelp about the restaurant going to sh**.

01:38

But also bees that gradually figure out that you can push that cap out the way.

01:42

And once you light that fire, some of them really get into the pushing.

01:45

All right, Millie, you did it.

01:47

You can stop now. Pretty clever, these bees.

01:50

But if you train them on a different shape cap

01:52

and then present them with both kinds of caps,

01:55

they'll push the shape they were trained on first.

01:57

Regardless of which one is covering up the sugar hole.

02:00

So they're learning, but they're not quite getting the full picture.

02:03

But pushing things out the way is pretty normal for a bee.

02:06

Flowers like that of the black locust don't just give up the pollen.

02:10

You have to force it open.

02:11

So what about learning something new that doesn't involve pushing?

02:15

Here, you have some “flowers.”

02:16

I'm doing air quotes.

02:18

They've got a hole in the middle with sugar in it,

02:20

and the whole thing is under a clear cover.

02:22

But there's a string attached that you can pull to get at it.

02:25

Now, you give this setup to a bunch of bumblebees, and not much happens.

02:29

And a lot of buzzing around.

02:30

I mean, might be because the flowers looked like crap

02:33

didn't even drop petals on them.

02:34

I know it's scientists. Didn't have the balls to go to art school, but still.

02:38

Anyway, you might find a rare bee the one in 100

02:40

sort of thing that can figure this thing out on the first go.

02:44

But, you know, those kind of bees: getting drunk the night before the SAT sort of bees.

02:48

But most of the rest of us, sorry, them need a little help.

02:51

But what you can do is train them by gradually pushing the flower

02:55

under the cover.

02:55

And that way they learn to pull on the string to get the juice.

02:58

Not bad.

02:59

Right?

02:59

And listen, once they learn it, they’re champs at it. I mean you want to give them a job.

03:03

But look at this.

03:04

You take another bee that doesn't know how to do it.

03:07

Put that bee in a box and let it watch the train bee pull the string?

03:11

Now, let that be out the box.

03:12

And you know what it friggin learned by watching.

03:15

Now the trained bee can still do some things that this one can't.

03:19

Like, if you add extra strings so the flower doesn't move right away.

03:22

The trained bee keeps pulling until it works.

03:25

The one who learned by watching just kind of gives up.

03:28

So some things aren't getting across, but in this way

03:31

they can teach each other some very complex things.

03:34

Here's a bee

03:34

trained to do a two step puzzle where you only get the reward at the end.

03:38

And again, another bee can learn just by watching.

03:42

Looks like a bit of an annoying student, gets right up in there.

03:45

Now he's gone for a vape.

03:46

All right, I'm back. Blue thing, red thing. Got it.

03:49

I know what you're thinking. What about balls?

03:51

Listen, what you've heard is true.

03:53

Bees love balls. Like before...

03:56

I even show you stuff about how smart they are,

03:58

you should know that bees really love balls.

04:01

If you make a clear path from a bee’s nest to food, nothing in the way.

04:06

But to get there, the bees have to walk past

04:08

what is essentially a bee sized Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit,

04:11

they stop and they play with those freaking balls.

04:14

Not for some reward or anything like that.

04:16

They play with balls.

04:18

So it's not surprising that you can train a bee to play one round of mini golf

04:22

and look at how they train them with a little bee puppet on a stick.

04:26

And when they put the ball in the middle, they get a sugar snack

04:28

and they eventually get the hang of it.

04:30

Look at this one.

04:31

She throws it

04:32

so hard, she does a somersault and she's like, “Come on, it hit the middle.”

04:36

“Where's my sugar?” Anyway, now you have the trained

04:38

bee teach a novice bee how to put the ball in the hole.

04:41

But this time you have three balls and the two closest ones are glued down.

04:45

So it has to use the farthest one.

04:48

Now you let the novice bee try it on its own and you don't glue down

04:51

any of the balls.

04:53

And you know what?

04:53

It uses the ball that was closest to the middle.

04:56

The one that gets to the treat the fastest.

04:58

Even though it was trained on a different ball.

05:01

That's innovation.

05:02

Now, this allows knowledge to spread through an entire colony.

05:05

Bees teaching other bees.

05:07

That's what this shows, how that string pulling skill from

05:10

before went from A to B to B to B.

05:13

If you like this show and you like to learn like the bee,

05:16

do, please go and check out brilliant.org.

05:19

Brilliant is a free and easy way to learn math, science and computer science.

05:24

They have been a long time

05:25

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05:29

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05:30

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05:34

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05:37

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05:42

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05:46

Turns out there's lots of choices being made for you.

05:48

And then there's lessons on how to compress those ping pong videos

05:52

to smaller file sizes without losing quality.

05:55

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05:56

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06:00

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06:04

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06:09

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06:11

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06:13

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06:16

Start learning. Get inspired.

06:18

Check out Brilliant today. Where were we?

06:22

Oh right. It makes sense that

06:23

bees can share knowledge.

06:25

I mean, bees are social butterflies.

06:27

I mean, they're bees, but they all live together

06:29

and they have to have some complicated roommate meetings.

06:32

Like, who's going to get the groceries

06:33

or in this example, how to choose the location of a new home.

06:37

Now, out of 10,000 bees or so, only a couple hundred of them are the Scouts.

06:42

And the Scouts go off and look for a good location, maybe a nice hole.

06:46

And if they find something, they come back with directions.

06:49

But they don't blab about it.

06:50

They do it through interpretive dance.

06:53

It's like if a mime had to give directions to the porta potty at Coachella.

06:57

Here's how it works.

06:58

They do this sort of figure eight thing, right?

07:00

And when they go through the center, they shake their a**.

07:03

This already packs in a bunch of info.

07:05

It's like the Morse code of twerking. The direction they move in

07:08

while they shake it corresponds to the direction of the location.

07:12

Check it out. They're doing this on a vertical surface.

07:14

The up direction means straight towards the sun.

07:17

Down is away from the sun.

07:18

So this direction here is like 5:00, away from the sun.

07:22

Now the distance to the location is how long they shake it.

07:25

It's roughly a thousand meters for every second of shaking.

07:29

Apparently, they bought into the metric system.

07:32

Now, you might be thinking how the hell do these bees

07:34

know how far they flew?

07:36

Well, at one point

07:37

they thought the bees were measuring the energy that they used to get there.

07:40

So they put tiny weights on the bees to see if it changed their estimates.

07:44

And you know what?

07:44

It mainly proved you shouldn't put weights on bees.

07:47

Now there's a bunch of bees with muscular calves walking around.

07:51

Another time

07:51

they put these tents up as landmarks on the way from a hive to a feeder.

07:55

And then they

07:56

changed the number of landmarks which seem to confuse some of the bees.

07:59

So what now?

08:00

Bees can count? Well it seems they can, especially in lower numbers.

08:04

Here's one avoiding four and landing on two.

08:07

Here's one

08:07

they taught to tell the difference between 11 and 12.

08:10

You can give them two scenarios

08:12

and train them to pick the larger one or the smaller one in this scenario.

08:16

Look at it. Go back and forth, just to be sure.

08:18

Perfectionist bee.

08:19

And if you train it on picking the larger number,

08:21

it won't just pick the one with more shapes.

08:24

It'll also pick one with the same number of shapes.

08:27

But where the shapes themselves are bigger.

08:29

It's like the concept of larger. And look at this.

08:32

If you train them to pick the smaller thing,

08:34

they recognize that nothing is smaller than something.

08:37

I mean, that's the concept of zero.

08:39

In this one, if the bee sees yellow shapes, it's trained to go inside

08:43

and look for the panel with one less than the number of shapes outside.

08:47

Freaking subtraction.

08:48

If the color of the shapes is blue, the bee knows to add one to the number.

08:52

I mean, they can do math.

08:54

You probably only knew about their spelling. Kill me.

08:56

But discreet counting doesn't seem to be the thing that helps them judge distances.

09:00

Instead, they seem to use something called optical flow,

09:04

which is kind of like the rate that things go by in your visual field.

09:07

And if you know that

09:08

this is how bees measure things, you can kind of screw with them.

09:12

You put them in a tunnel, for example, with stripes on the floor.

09:15

As it passes over the stripes, it measures the distance

09:17

and has an appropriate a** shaking.

09:19

Now you do the same thing, except in this one, the stripes are moving.

09:23

So as the bee flies, it thinks it's covering a hell of a lot more ground.

09:27

And it tells its buddies about a location that's miles away.

09:30

Meanwhile, you put a horizontal stripe and nothing changes while you fly over it.

09:34

They don't know how far they went.

09:36

And this explains, by the way,

09:38

why bees will often drown if they fly over still water.

09:41

You can see this effect by using a mirror, too.

09:44

The bee keeps getting closer to the ground to try and discern some movement,

09:48

but all there is is a reflection of a stationary bee.

09:51

So you can see it keeps bumping into the ground.

09:54

Anyway, in addition to distance and direction,

09:57

there's one more thing that seems to be communicated in this dance.

10:00

The bees estimate of how good the location is that it's found

10:04

seems to be related to how often it does the dance in a row.

10:08

If it thinks it's found something great, it just keeps going.

10:11

And then there’s bees like this one - that don’t seem very enthused.

10:15

It flew like three feet and found a shoe.

10:18

Now, the reason for going on and on about a good location

10:21

is because the bees eventually have to pick one location for their new home.

10:25

So these dances aren't just about the directions, it's about marketing.

10:28

If you found a good location, you try and convince other scouts to check it out

10:33

and then dance like you do until there's enough to make the decision.

10:36

And listen, since you've stayed around this long, I'll tell you one other thing.

10:40

All of this communication about distance and location and quality

10:44

mainly happen inside a hive in the dark.

10:48

Mic drop. A tiny little bee

10:50

Mic drop.

10:51

You think the bee likes the honey?

10:54

No, no, no.

10:56

Bees love balls.

11:01

Can’t tempt a bee with your money.

11:04

No, no, no, no.

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関連タグ
Bee IntelligenceCognitive AbilitiesProblem SolvingMemory SkillsBee CommunicationInsect BehaviorMathematical BeesSocial InsectsWaggle DanceNeurological StudiesAnimal LearningBehavioral EcologyInsect NeuronsBee TrainingInnovation in NatureColony DecisionsBrilliant.orgEducational SponsorshipLearning Platform
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