Curiosity Science.

Are bees intelligent? Can they learn from training? Do they have personalities? These were some of the questions asked in a research article published online by Biology Letters, a Royal Society journal. But before your dismiss this article as yet another silly escapade by crazy scientists to answer questions no one cares about, perhaps you should know that this paper was written by twenty-five eight to ten year old primary school children from the town of Blackawton in Devon, UK. Titled “Blackawton bees”, the paper was the result of a scientific collaboration between University College London neuroscientist Beau Lotto and the headmaster and students of Blackawton Primary School. Interested in galvanizing public interest in science by increasing public involvement, Dr. Lotto decided to conduct an experiment outside his laboratory in a public space, in this case the Norman church in Blackawton. To further involve the public in science he chose to train a group of primary school children to ask scientific questions and to devise hypotheses and experiments to answer those questions. The result of his efforts is a novel and credible work of scientific research designed and executed entirely by primary school children, that makes new discoveries about bumble-bees. Written by the Blackawton school kids, complete with hand-drawn figures and tables, the article even passed the stringent peer-review process at Biology Letters, a process where fellow scientists read, review and evaluate the paper before it is published.

“[Science is….] the process of playing with rules that enables one to reveal previously unseen patterns of relationships that extend our collective understanding of nature and human nature”, says Dr. Lotto. Driven by this understanding of science and the need for a good basic science education, Dr. Lotto approached the headmaster of Blackawton School David Strudwick to conduct this experiment on public involvement in science. Together, they devised a training program to teach the students how to think scientifically. The training included playing games, devising and solving puzzles, explaining the puzzles to others and even watching some David Letterman videos of “Stupid Dog Tricks”.

The students then started discussing bumble-bees. They were particularly interested in knowing how the bees could differentiate between flowers that had nectar and the ones that didn’t. So they asked whether bees learn this discriminatory power from prior training and whether their learning was based on the colour of the flower or its position in a field of many flowers. They also wanted to know if different bees learned differently, suggesting that bees may have personalities.  In order to answer these questions, the students trained bees to recognize nectar-containing flowers. For this, they used a bee arena- a closed Plexiglas box with four square panels inside it. Each panel had 16 circular holes, which were covered with coloured sheets and were backlit to simulate differently coloured flowers. Each hole had a small Plexiglas rod that containined either sugar water, salt water or no liquid at all. For training purposes, the middle four flowers of each panel were filled with sugar water whereas the surrounding twelve holes were filled with salt water. This encouraged the bees to feed at the flowers in the middle and discouraged them from feeding at the surrounding flowers.  The sugared flowers were always in the middle but were coloured blue on two panels and yellow on the others and surrounded by the opposite coloured flowers. The children then labeled the five bees they used in their experiments by painting different coloured dots on them and introduced each of them individually into the training box. By feeding at the different flowers in the arena, the bees were trained to distinguished nectar-filled flowers from the rest. Once the training was completed, the children began their experiments.

For their first experiment, the children left the panels unchanged, but just removed the sugar and salt water from the flowers. They wanted to see if even in the absence of sugar, if the bees would remember to visit the middle squares because they contained sugar in the past. In fact, they saw that the bees did attempt to feed at the middle flowers ninety percent of the time even in the absence of sugar, suggesting that the bees did learn something from the training. Funnily, some bees preferred to feed at yellow flowers in the middle whereas other preferred blue flowers in the middle. So how did the bees know to continue feeding at the middle flowers? Was it the colour of the flowers that they memorized? To understand this, the kids changed the colour of the middle four flowers to green. Now the bees tended to feed more frequently at the surrounding flowers (which were still either blue or yellow) and not at the middle ones, suggesting that perhaps the bees used a colour cue to find sugared flowers. Interestingly, two particular bees seemed a tad bit smarter than the others and continued feeding at the middle flowers although they were now green. Was it perhaps that these bees were learning to approach the colour that was less represented in the panel? To ask this, the kids moved the middle four differently coloured squares of the panel to the four corners of the panel. If the bees preferred the less frequent colour in a panel, they would go to the corners more often to feed than the rest of the panel. However, the kids observed that in this case the bees went to the corner flowers just as often as they did to the rest of the flowers in the panel, suggesting that the bees didn’t use this strategy to find the nectar-filled flowers.

Although simple, this work is novel and improves our understanding of how bees see and understand colour and pattern. An accompanying commentary on this paper helps put this research into the context of other research on bumble-bee colour vision.

To the kids however, the incentives to do this work were different. They wanted to dispel the myth that humans are the only smart animals around and that other animals aren’t as smart. By learning whether bumble-bees are smart, they reasoned that we could better appreciate and understand them and other animals. And in fact the kids concluded that bees are smart, after all they were able to learn a colour pattern that was taught to them. They even have personalities, since different bees behaved differently in the experiments, with some being smarter than others. In fact, so impressed are the kids with the fun of science and training bees that they are already talking about their next scientific endeavour- teaching the bees to play Sudoku!

Heartwarming and refreshing, this article is certainly worth a read.