[HN Gopher] How Bees Argue ___________________________________________________________________ How Bees Argue Author : imartin2k Score : 83 points Date : 2020-01-08 06:37 UTC (16 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.overcomingbias.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.overcomingbias.com) | dsalzman wrote: | I don't beelieve it! | pmoskovi wrote: | Inspired by the behavior of bees and the Seeley's Honeybee | Democracy book, I created and gave a talk, titled Extreme | Cooperation of Superorganisms - Four Lessons Humans Can Learn | from Bees: https://slides.com/petermoskovits/superorganism/ | tboyd47 wrote: | Takeaways: | | * It is meaningful to speak of animals having "opinions" but it's | not clear how those match up with human ones. | | * Individual opinion is guided by a combination of random chance | and direct perception. | | * Individual bee opinions have low success rate, but group | consensus of bees has an extremely high success rate. | | * Opinions acquired via transmission are more weakly held than | opinions acquired directly. | | * Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find | this fascinating because it means there's some information that | would not be revealed without the bees challenging each other. | | * Opinions are often never changed in an individual, even if they | are wrong. | monkeycantype wrote: | The most interesting thing I've ever seen was an argument between | ants. As a student I worked on a project to use California grey | ants for pest control in peach orchards 'Formica aerata' (it's | very effective). This involved capturing wild colonies (digging | them up) and breeding them in captivity. To move the colony from | the box of dug up dirt to the enclosure, I coated the inside of | the box with liquid Teflon (future cancer risk?) and slowly | flooded the box, the only way out was a bridge to the new | enclosure. Over the next ten hours the ants would compete, some | moving eggs and larvae to the new enclosure, some moving them | back to the queen. Eventually, when the rising flood had | converted enough of the workers to the cause of the revolution, | they will make an attempt to move the queen, which she and and a | coiterie of anti-diluvianists would resist. The bridge to new | enclosure would be a solid mass of writhing black (like Venom | from Spider-Man). The queen, noticeably larger than the workers | would repeat an escape and climb back over the living bridge to | the steadily submerging dirt pile again and again, until | eventually overwhelmed she was dragged by the masses to the new | home, flailing and struggling all the way. | Arnavion wrote: | (Imagining "anti-diluvianist" ants cracked me up, especially | because of the double pun.) | | Does that mean the ants were unable to communicate the upcoming | danger to each other and had to rely on first-hand observation? | That's surprising given how much they communicate otherwise. | monkeycantype wrote: | I don't know, but the way I thought about it is that I | imagined each ant was quite simple, and the fight was a | distributed mind weighing the sum of the fractions of reality | perceived by each individual | CobrastanJorji wrote: | Could be a security mechanism. Moving a queen would be risky. | A large number of ants would be necessary to move the queen | if she always resisted, which means a very small chance of | false positives or a malicious mis-signal. | newnewpdro wrote: | Please tell me you recorded video of this. | monkeycantype wrote: | No - was pre digital cameras - but others have since | rolltiide wrote: | link to one of those kind of videos? | monkeycantype wrote: | https://youtu.be/deuI0s4VlAs | | Again on train on broken phone, haven't watched this but | it takes you into the YouTube space of ant keepers | ydnaclementine wrote: | Is there a video of that exact process? (not sure what to | search) | monkeycantype wrote: | Im on the train on half broken phone, so this is not a | well researched response | | moving+ant+colony+to+enclosure+queen | | flooding formicarium | | Workers move queen ant | | Seem to be returning promising videos ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-01-08 23:00 UTC)