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Smart Bees Continue to Draw Interest
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from University College London (UCL) have shown that bees are able to solve complicated color puzzles. In their study, bees were trained to find artificial flowers containing a nectar reward and colored in blue. Then they removed the nectar and put at random artificial flowers illuminated by yellow, blue, yellow and green lights. But wherever the blue flowers were, the bees continued to select them even if there was no longer a reward. These findings may soon lead to the design of sophisticated visual systems for autonomous robots."
The story here isn't that bees are smart - this is simple pavlovian association going on, not any sort of problem solving. The story is that they are able to recognize the color of objects that are complexly lit.
They keep going for it after it stops paying? Funny, we hear that octopus are smart because they don't.
Someone confused "memory" with "intelligence" again.
You can't take the sky from me...
In other news my dog can find and separate his medical pills even when they're complexly hidden in cheese. He has self-trained to reject the pill and spit it on the floor while still consuming the cheese.
This may possibly soon lead to complex robotic cheese/pill separators for robots that have colds.
1) Imagine a beowulf cluster of apiaries with such bees.
2) a) Train bee
b) ?????
c) Profit!
3) I for one, welcome our new smart color bee overlords
4) In Soviet Russia, the bee sees *you*
5) I'm allergic to bees, you insensitive clod!
6) Trained bees? Won't somebody think of the children!
7) Netcraft confirms: the bees are dying
8) All your nectar are belong to bees.
9) Those are right-wing, neocon bees.
10) Bees teh sux! Wasps 4evar!
11) All I wanted was some frickin color-distinguishing bees with some frickin laserbeams!
12) In my day, we had bees that could distinguish flowers by taste or smell, at 100 yards, in a snowstorm. And liked it!
13) I don't see any b33#$(*&#$(*#& NO CARRIER
5 Comments in 45 minutes? This must be some strange use of the word "Interest" that I was previously unaware of.
And coming up next, can bees think? A new study confirms that, no, no they cannot.