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Honeybees Seem To Understand the Notion of Zero, Study Finds (sci-news.com)
A new study published in the journal Science finds honeybees are able to understand the concept of zero numerosity, joining the ranks of dolphins, parrots, and primates. Sci-News.com reports: The study authors set out to test the honeybee on its understanding, marking individual honeybees for easy identification and luring them to a specially-designed testing apparatus. The bees were trained to choose an image with the lowest number of elements in order to receive a reward of sugar solution. For example, the bees learned to choose three elements when presented with three vs. four; or two elements when presented with two vs. three. When the scientists periodically tested the bees with an image that contained no elements versus an image that had one or more, the bees understood that the set of zero was the lower number -- despite never having been exposed to an "empty set."
If they didn't understand the concept of zero or empty then they'd keep going back to flowers that had run out of nectar.
Understanding quantity is a useful survival trait, I don't understand why some scientists find it so amazing that animals understand the concept of "none".
Or they were trained to avoid the element itself. What's more likely, that an insect can "understand the concept of zero" or that it can combine two stimuli (I want to go towards this thing for the sugar, but I want to stay away from the element)?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Newsflash! Scientists discover honey bees are smarter than the average Clinton voter. In related news, Facebook promises to censor all pictures of bees.
To be fair to Clinton's apologists, the standards of what it's OK for the honeybees to do to unwilling flowers has changed.
Understanding zero is comprehending the number of bees that will remain if we continue to use pesticides.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Their communication system alone is amazing. Their mental mapping when flying between locations is based on the direction of the sun, but they automatically adjust for how the sun will move (even at night or when it's otherwise not visible), in a manner that adjusts for latitude and the passing of the seasons. In the hive, they waggle dance to indicate the direction and distance to a resource (the static charges they build up can be perceived by nearby bees when they waggle). Moving straight up means "in the direction of the sun" - not "the direction of the sun when I last set out", but the current direction of the sun. Every second spent on the waggle before looping back to the start represents a kilometer of distance. A waggle dance is usually enough to bring another bee to within a couple hundred meters of a target, wherein they start searching visually. Bees don't blindly listen to waggle dances; if they're having good luck on their own, they're unlikely to listen to it, only bees that have been having trouble finding resources tend to follow them. If a bee had a *bad* experience with the location being danced to - found no resources, found a dead bee, etc - there's a "NO" buzz frequency (380Hz) which they can do. The more impressed a bee is with their location, the more vigorously they waggle dance, while the more opposed a bee is to a location, the more it does its "NO" buzz; they can even end up getting into physical fights over the issue. Advocates of different locations can also get into fights with each other.
It's easy to think of individual bees as mindless drones as part of a "greater whole", but they really aren't; they're impressive even individually. In addition to solar navigation, they also have landmark navigation, visual navigation to small targets, and they learn what sort of things pay good rewards (which as this study shows, can involve significant reasoning). Contrary to the popular image, the queen doesn't "give direction"; she's not a "leader". She just "smells nice", and other bees want to be near her. But beyond that, each bee is an individual.
They're fastidiously clean. They not only will remove debris and any dead bees from a hive, but they're adamant about not defecating in the hive. Honeybees will literally hold it until they die if they can't leave (e.g. in the winter due to weather) rather than foul their own hive. And maintaining the hive is a constant struggle because there's an endless list of pests and predators that want to eat either the bees, their larva, or the honey; a hive is such a tempting resource.
Preserving the honey is of course quite the task, and bees have specific climate requirements in general. They do amazing job at managing the internal climate. Some bees will act like air conditioners, fanning with their wings to create airflow through certain areas. They'll add or remove propolis to the hive to adjust how "weathertight" it is, to get the right amount of airflow without letting in pests. In the winter, they cluster together for warmth in the "winter cluster", which slowly migrates across the comb, eating their honey stores as they go; their collective body heat keeps them from freezing, and they minimize their surface area by clustering together. Some (non-European) honeybees have taken this even further - made famous by The Oatmeal, Japanese honeybees fight off attacks from otherwise impervious Japanese giant hornets (aka real-life Tracker Jackers) by clustering around them and raising their body temperature to the point that they survive but the hornets effectively die of heat stroke.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
Considering that insects don't have the same kind of image processing or, indeed, even the same kind of eyes, I find this far more likely than they are counting elements. It is far more likely that a bee is being trained to go where there is less overall of whatever color it is the "element" is and gravitating that way. Or, and this now strikes me as being even more likely, they are going where there is more of the background. A human can look at an image and with our image processing, break it down into elements and count them. Our brains do this in the background and it might not even strike us that the image with fewer elements has more background because that's not how our brains work. It is how our brains work so strongly that it is also appearing as a bias in the way these results are being interpreted. But from a color, shade, or pixel perspective, it can be equally said that the image with fewer "elements" on it also has more background.
I must say I find it frustrating the article has no reference to what the images were of or what the "elements" were that the bees were supposedly counting.
The elites have spent the last 40 years dumbing down society, the last thing they want is a well-informed electorate. Trump is an aberration it generally doesn't matter which party you vote for they are all controlled by the same people.
And they can sniff out hidden USB drives. Nobody can figure out how to accelerate an object at free-fall speed when there are steel columns and concrete floors resisting though. Even the bees are stumped. AE911Truth org
Now I'd like to see the experimental setup to check for negative numbers!
Sure, they understand '0', but do they understand what happens when you put a '1' or a '2' in front of it?
I bet they don't.
Maybe they're not counting dots, but white space area? More white space area is better, no concept of 0 required.
That would be fact similar to how human babies learn count. At an early stage in development they only notice/care about differences in surface area. Show them 2 objects with a 50% surface area each and 1 object with a 100% surface area and they will regard them as equal. Only later on human babies distinguish between the 2 situations.
Maybe they're not counting dots, but white space area? More white space area is better, no concept of 0 required.
That would be fact similar to how human babies learn count. At an early stage in development they only notice/care about differences in surface area. Show them 2 objects with a 50% surface area each and 1 object with a 100% surface area and they will regard them as equal. Only later on human babies distinguish between the 2 situations.
I know this is against Slashdot policy, but I did take a look at the original article in Science, and the training images had clearly different sized items in them, with the total area being about the same, so your area theory does not quite hold.
Even in the case of zero the bee is still being shown a picture. In the bee's brain that might count as a "something" where this pure "something" is more attractive than that dirty "something" when it is collecting nectar. It might not be anything more than that.
Now let's design an experiment to see if they can comprehend the countably infinite.
I think you will find out that most species "understand zero" if it is about the number of predators in sight.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
We took the concept of "nothing" and made a TV show about it.
#DeleteFacebook
Of course animals understand that no stuff is less than any amount of stuff. No lions is less lions than 1 or 2 lions.
Zero is a symbolic representation. The innovation is assigning a symbol.
-Dave
they did 3 years of control studies to eliminate any other possibilities.. Its right there in the article you incurious pseudointellectual.
“Zero is a difficult concept to understand and a mathematical skill that doesn’t come easily — it takes children a few years to learn.”
It was easier for the bees: they didn't have to overcome the handicap of being nattered-at by unionized, strike-for-pay drones.
Please stop using the word 'Pedantic' only an idiot uses that to make him look smarter.
So bees are smarter than language designers who start arrays at 1.
Are any known examples of creatures who *can* count, but who *don't* understand zero? In other words, creatures who can be trained to pick the image with the smaller number of elements, but who fail to recognize that an empty image contains fewer elements than an image that is not empty?
That would actually be a more interesting result (I guess). I'm having a hard time getting my ahead around why this is an important question. I know that *written* systems for counting did not always use a symbol for zero (perhaps because with a sufficiently-primitive written system there is no real use for a zero symbol), but the concept that "none is less than one" seems inherent to the idea of counting. In fact, it's hard to imagine a creature that understands counting but does not understand that none is less than one.
Do honey bees understand?
slime mold can solve a maze , but I would not impart to it the ability to 'understand' that it is solving a problem.
Honey bees recognize quantity , but that seems a vast a difference between that and understanding that nothing is a quantity or even recognizing quantity as a property.
Do computers 'understand' the programs we write? certainly I could program some drones to perform the same task , would a person then claim the computer 'understands' quantity?
Responding to a stimuli and being able to form an abstract concept of that stimuli as a generalization that is then manipulated to solve problems and model predictably ( aka understand a thing or concept) are very very different.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
As far as I know, only humans can convey the concept of "not", such as, "These are not the droids you are looking for". Bees cannot communicate negation, such as "This flower does not have pollen" or "This is not what we want". Non-humans can only communicate what "is", not what "is not".
If that is the case, then "zero" or "lower" has nothing to do with it and this research is an example of humans anthropomorphizing animal behavior according to human-based organizing principles.
Btu what do I know. I'm just an instructional designer. :-)
Bees prefer light colors to dark. In fact they are prone to attack dark colored objects.
Perhaps this isn't so much a counting observation as a bee preference for an overall lighter toned card - perhaps they see it as a sort of halftone print.
Sounds like this folks just wanted their names in the headlines by virtue of incredulous claims.
... I want to know the list of animals you have tested in this way that were able to understand that 3 5, but couldn't figure out that nothing is less than 2.
Seems like a poor experiment to me.
I might speculate that the bees learned that there was a reward where there were fewer 'elements'.
It seems a stretch to conclude that 'zero' has any bearing. 'Least' seems more likely.
Or, perhaps they sensed where the sugar reward was! A more valuable trait than realizing 'zero'!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.