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       # 2020-08-30 - The Honey Bee by James L. Gould & Carol Grant Gould
       
       This book was given to me as a gift.  I appreciated the writing and
       learned a few things.  Toward the end, the book became less
       interesting because it read more like a technical manual on the inner
       workings of the bee body-mind.  Below are some excerpts from the book.
       
       We are normally blind to ultraviolet because of a faint yellowish
       pigment in our cornea; people who have had their corneas removed can
       see ultraviolet light, though they experience it as blue rather than
       as a separate color.
       
       The [bee] sensitivity to polarized light, which von Frisch did not
       discover until the late 1940s, has its own particular use: there is
       an elaborate and beautiful pattern of polarized light in the sky,
       visible to us only through filters, that enables bees to find their
       way when the sun is hidden behind clouds.
       
       One ability we lack is the capacity to sense the earth's magnetic
       field.  Bees are more sensitive to this mysterious force than any
       other species that we know of.
       
       This strategy, by which a behavior is controlled by the careful
       balancing of two opposing forces, is common in our own bodies.
       Virtually every movement of a finger or limb is tempered by muscles
       pulling in the opposite direction; this gives us more precise control
       of our actions than we would have otherwise.  Some hormones
       circulating in the blood have antagonistic effects, and it is the
       balance between the two at any given moment that determines the net
       response.  The idea that all the bees in a hive work in concert in a
       common effort to achieve a single goal, then, is a myth.  The
       ambivalence of individual bees and the differences of opinion between
       workers is highly adaptive: it allows for faster, more flexible and
       finely graded control than would be possible if all acted with one
       mind.
       
       The dance communication system is called a language because it
       satisfies all the intuitive criteria that have been posited for a
       true language.  [It encodes distance based on effort, and direction
       based on the position of the sun.]
       
       The existence of dialects in the bee language, however, does not mean
       that the language is learned: honey bees reared in isolation from
       dancers can perform correctly oriented dances after their first
       foraging discovery and correctly interpret the dances of others from
       the outset.  When pupae of one race are put into a colony of another,
       they dance as adults using their own race's conversion factor, having
       learned nothing from the dances of their foster sisters; bees of
       difference races simply misunderstand each other's dances.
       
       A series of such experiments convinced von Frisch that there is no
       correlate for altitude in the dance.
       
       In sum, then, a forager forms her own judgment about food quality,
       considering the concentration, viscosity, and weight of the nectar,
       the distance to and feel of the flower, and the nature of the patch;
       in the hive she then listens to the "applause" of the unloaders and
       factors this in as well.  With these two sets of opinions, the bee
       then chooses whether or not to dance.  This use of subjective
       criteria and audience feedback, then, results in a recruitment system
       that is extremely sensitive to the needs of the hive and the
       contingencies of the moment.
       
       [Experienced bees, when transported in the dark away from their home,
       can find their way back by recognizing landmarks.  This shows that
       they have some kind of memory and mental map.  They can also dance
       directions to the feeder they were transported to, even though they
       never flew to there from the hive before.]
       
       On short, the cavity nesters dancing in the dark, have sound in their
       dance, while the open nesters do not. ... These differences all add
       up to one conclusion: open nesters depend more on vision, and
       attenders observe the raised abdomen of the dancer as she performs;
       in cavities, visual information is gone, and sound has evolved to
       replace it.
       
       author: Gould, James L., 1945-
 (TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/James_L._Gould
       LOC:    QL568.A6 G68
       tags:   book,non-fiction,science
       title:  The Honey Bee
       
       # Tags
       
 (DIR) book
 (DIR) non-fiction
 (DIR) science