Oh, I see the confusion. The person I responded to was having a different issue -- regular everyday bee feeders (used by most beekeepers the off-bloom season) being invaded by the starving attack ants. That's what my hanging-station suggestion was about.
Grounded bees don't walk far -- in my observation no more than a few feet, if that. So it'd be damned hard to place "refueling stations" where they'll reliably find them anyway, unless you happen to notice some particular spot where a lot of 'em seem to wind up grounded.
As the beekeeper I worked for put it, he wanted his bees to use their energy making honey, not making replacement bees!
I vaguely recall that I put it next to whatever water container they were already drinking from, so they couldn't miss it. I used ordinary sugar candy with colour so they could see it (mostly yellow and purple).
Beekeeper I worked for used a wooden trough -- filled it up with Xmas candy and poured water over the top. Apparently his bees weren't fussy!
I've had to hand-pollinate squash in my own garden due to lack of bees. Trust me, it wouldn't become "more expensive", it would become prohibitively expensive.
Wouldn't putting the sugar water in a hanging basket help?
I use a painting of motor oil to keep ants out of my dog food bins, just a swath around the bottom of the bin. Soap also works but motor oil lasts a lot longer.
Any idea why starving bees would reject sugar water? Here in the desert, during the dry season there's often NOTHING for them to collect. My local wild beehive (nice gentle bees so I'd like to keep them healthy!) follows me around for water, and they arrive in clouds when I start spraying down stuff, but when I put out sugar water they ignore it, even tho they are often clearly starving. (They look poor and weak.)
I used to work for a beekeeper, tho mainly in the honey house. If most folks could see honey at that stage, they'd never eat it.:)
Yes, bumblebees often crawl around on the ground, and nest below the surface. But honeybees don't. And it's not really typical for honeybees to rest on the ground for long periods.
They are are pretty hard to mistake for one another, if you've even a vague idea of what each looks like. And only honeybees have a big economic impact. (You like to eat? Then you should like bees!)
Then I noticed the filename and imemdiately thought, "That's no bee, it's Thumbelina!!"
There's a wild beehive somewhere on my place (never have found it, tho it might be high up in one of the old hollow trees) and being we're in the desert, a lot of the year they clearly do not get enough to eat (lots of them being small or weak). But they've completely ignored the sugar water I've put out for them. [I used to work for a beekeeper, so I knew to do this.]
I don't recall if consumables are covered by First Sale (all I remember offhand is that it was meant for books) but...
The Army might want to check out my truck. Its Ford factory-original puke-green paint (just about the same colour as Donnagel, come to think of it) is absolutely invisible under yellow sodium lights. You can lose the thing in an otherwise-empty sodium-lit parking lot, as I discovered one year when I was last one out of the Long Beach Convention Center.
Now all we need is a way to illuminate battlefields with sodium lights, then paint all our troops and equipment that pale Ford puke-green. Great for sneak attacks!;)
What's the name of that U.S. law that forbids a seller from dictating what brand of consumables the purchaser uses? One wonders at what point the DMCA type shit will collide with that.
If the Army's radar is pointed at a domestic road, they need to review the Constitution!
Damned good points, and We The People south of the 49th should remember that as well, since our own gov't has forgotten that we are CITIZENS, and now sees us only as REVENUE SOURCES. And of course, when lobbying interests get into the act, that's REVENUE -- into politicians' warchests and into the corps' bank accounts.
Good point. And I would posit that even non-privatized programs like SocSec are at the mercy of corporations -- if retired folks don't get paid SocSec, Medicaid, and have no money, who will keep the elderly-oriented industries in business??
Me neither... but the flipside is that I no longer buy music, unless I can find it used.
So instead of getting SOME money from me, they get NO money from me.
Interesting point re speeding vs filesharing. Probably about the same proportional risk, but the penalties are disproportionate by several orders of magnitude, and inversely proportional to the risks they put on others.
The ones I've known have been about middling, far as I could tell (been around 'em, haven't personally trained 'em). They've also been very calm, sensible dogs (good house pets), which can make a dog look dimmer than it really is. Definitely more wattage than the Borzois and Afghans I've worked with (which are good at their jobs, but rather lacking in thought processes), but the Asian sighthounds are a different type of dog.
The first dog I was ever paid to train was a Borzoi. Sweet dog but a waste of air when it came to learning anything!
Actually, I used to work with a wide variety of breeds. I wound going mainly with Labs because they were easier to live with, harder to screw up, less work for more gain, and I could do more interesting things with them. And I don't like dim dogs much, nor do I care for those that lack the desire to work FOR people.
Success often means the right dog for a specific existing program. The same bias exists in, frex, fieldtrial retrievers -- an "Amish-bred" dog will probably not do well in a wholly collar-conditioning program, and v.v., no matter how good or poor the dog is otherwise. One of the brightest lines in the breed pretty much died out in the 1970s-80s, because at the time an "Amish" style dog was ruined by the conditioning programs of the day, no matter how much more brains and talent it had, so were not successful and were not bred from. Conversely some very dim animals were very successful in that program (including NFCs).
See, one of the problems with most trainers is that they are not breeders, and consequently they don't see beyond today's success, to what it might be doing to the breed tomorrow. I look at it from the other way round -- it's only success if it preserves the breed's best and most correct attributes, whatever those may be. And what's good and successful in, say, a SchIII Dobe would be a disaster in a hunting dog, and v.v.
But I don't happen to like dealing with that end of the species. YMMV.
What I was referring to was that if Downs children have surgery early on, to correct the mouth/tongue defects that render speech difficult for them, they develop far better mentally than if they don't get this intervention. Apparently the ability to produce feedback (ie. to talk) is a huge influence on how well a child's brain develops. One has to wonder how it might influence a dog, since a few DO try to "talk" (make clear attempts to imitate human speech) but obviously cannot form words as such.
I have to agree with that. AI might be useful where it's impossible to send either a human or a trained animal, but the problem with AI is judgment calls that fall outside its programming (which even animals, if trained rather than operant-conditioned, can manage to some degree). Do we really want Colossus in charge of world peace?? I certainly don't.
I've had a dog that grokked that sex = puppies (either for herself or for another bitch -- she wanted to steal the resulting puppies). I've seen dogs try to train other dogs. I've seen them do some fairly complex multi-level problem-solving, play practical jokes, deliberately deceive, etc, etc. And many can figure stuff out from only seeing it once, or from watching someone else's efforts (including learning from another's futility). As with children, there is a considerable influence from simply being around someone who talks to them and interacts, so they can pick up ordinary everyday speech and actions.
It's not the same style of intelligence as what modern education brings out in a human child (and the lack of opposable thumbs and a speech-capable tongue imposes certain limits), but it's very much the same level of thinking and comprehension as childrens' "playground learning" (which BTW we now know is critical to a child's ability to assimilate what it learns in more structured environments).
German Shepherds are not, contrary to popular belief, very well up on the canine intelligence scale. They condition fairly well and don't get as hung up in that (to the point of being unable to do anything else) as a Dobe, but they certainly don't think to the degree that, say, the working retrievers do.
BTW despite my profession I am not a "dog lover", which I agree clouds many folks' objectivity -- once they start regarding 'em as "fur kids" they start reading in stuff that ain't there. All you gotta do is look at cat freaks to see that... most cats are bloody retards compared even to dim dogs. I like my cats, but sometimes I swear if they had two brain cells, they'd have a synapse! Once in a blue moon a genuinely smart one comes along, but it's not the norm, nor is it in any primarily instinct-driven species (or breed, come back to dogs -- some of the primitives are damned dim bulbs).
Haha... I've seen that type eat 5-6 pounds of dog food at a crack just to prevent another dog from getting any. Definitely NOT the type I want in my kennel! Ain't nothin' but trouble, and after a certain point, not worth trying to, uh, communicate with.
Actually, some male dogs are better "mothers" than the pups' dams are. I've had several that actively parent puppies. This behaviour is most prevalent in smart dogs with more desire to please humans. OTOH, with the more wolflike dogs... well, I wouldn't let the average male, or worse yet an unbred female, NEAR puppies, if I wanted to keep them alive.
But if you run into one that lacks the "nice switch" (or more accurately the "Okay, you ARE the boss, now we're all in agreement" switch) -- and they do exist -- you have to be willing to take it as far as necessary. The message with the down-on-your-back trick is "I am willing to KILL you if you don't behave" and the dog has to believe it. Most believe instantly, no violence required, and they are much the happier for it, since dogs need to KNOW their place in life to feel secure. With those few that are wired like Cool Hand Luke... well, you have to be willing to demonstrate that you will take it as far as necessary, or all they've learned is that if they resist long enough, they can get away with it.
Dogs can learn complex visual signals; indeed, many will learn such signals more easily than voice commands. It's a short hop from a hand signal to a visual cue that's marks on paper. Some dogs may even figure out that it's variable, and interpret accordingly. I've seen dogs that could stack up to 3 unrelated commands, and any mature fieldtrial retriever remembers at least 4 related tasks at a time (frex a quad mark with a blind up the middle). What is reading? Stacking of tasks, if for the eye and brain rather than the hand or foot.
Actually, this might be a good approach for certain assistance dogs, should there be a disabled human for whom writing, or typing and sending to the printer, are more feasible than giving voice or hand signals. Dog hears printer working, goes to look, visual signal is printed on the paper. It wouldn't matter if it was the word "newspaper" or a picture of a bundle, whatever "language" you cared to use would do.
Dogs can do signal mixing too -- I once had a poodle that I'd trained in English, Spanish, and hand signals. I could use or even mix all three at random and it never confused her.
As you note, desire to please makes a huge difference in how any intelligence (whether present or absent) is directed and used.
The Oriental breeds tend to be 'street smart' in a survival-oriented way, but utterly lacking that connection with humans that we see as the desire to please -- to sublimate the dog's own desires and instincts in favour of what the human wants. Desire to please tends to negate dominance games too, because obviously the one who IS dominant is the one who deserves to be pleased, and the one who is the underling does the pleasing. But "If I don't believe you're in charge, why should I do something for you if I don't feel like it, or if the bribe isn't worth it?" You can sometimes lead such dogs around by their stomachs, but what happens when you don't have that bribe to hand, or the dog isn't hungry??
Bt the biggest problem with food training is that it inverts the master/servant relationship: In a normal relationship (ie. the way dogs -- and humans! -- are hardwired) the underling ALWAYS offers the bribe to the master, who then *may* graciously give part of it back to the servant (here represented by the dog). With food training, every "reward" informs the dog that the DOG is the boss. This confuses dogs that really want to please, and convinces dominant dogs that they are indeed in charge. And now we have a whole generation of food-trained dog owners who can't control their pets -- a problem that before the food-training craze was NOT the norm. (Do you hear an echo of the nanny state? I do.)
If at some point you're forced to physically discipline or restrain a dog with a Chow-type temperament, or interfere with what it wants (such as if a child sticks its hand into the food bowl), very often the result is that you get bitten, because they can't or won't tolerate being thwarted. There will be no warning when this happens.
That's all dandy if the dog belongs to a tribe of yak herders and largely fends for itself on the Siberian steppes; survival in that environment requires putting your own welfare FIRST (desire to please doesn't enter into it, so is not selected for). Not so good if you're a household with little kids. It doesn't help that we civilized folk been taught to never do the natural thing and just deck a dog that shows a dangerous level of dominance (exactly what another dog would do, for that matter).
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Oh, I see the confusion. The person I responded to was having a different issue -- regular everyday bee feeders (used by most beekeepers the off-bloom season) being invaded by the starving attack ants. That's what my hanging-station suggestion was about.
Grounded bees don't walk far -- in my observation no more than a few feet, if that. So it'd be damned hard to place "refueling stations" where they'll reliably find them anyway, unless you happen to notice some particular spot where a lot of 'em seem to wind up grounded.
As the beekeeper I worked for put it, he wanted his bees to use their energy making honey, not making replacement bees!
I vaguely recall that I put it next to whatever water container they were already drinking from, so they couldn't miss it. I used ordinary sugar candy with colour so they could see it (mostly yellow and purple).
Beekeeper I worked for used a wooden trough -- filled it up with Xmas candy and poured water over the top. Apparently his bees weren't fussy!
Fresh honey right out of the comb does have a slightly different taste, presumably some factor in the wax. When it's good, it's good. :D
(And when it's buckwheat honey, it's like rank molasses no matter what!)
I've had to hand-pollinate squash in my own garden due to lack of bees. Trust me, it wouldn't become "more expensive", it would become prohibitively expensive.
Wouldn't putting the sugar water in a hanging basket help?
I use a painting of motor oil to keep ants out of my dog food bins, just a swath around the bottom of the bin. Soap also works but motor oil lasts a lot longer.
Any idea why starving bees would reject sugar water? Here in the desert, during the dry season there's often NOTHING for them to collect. My local wild beehive (nice gentle bees so I'd like to keep them healthy!) follows me around for water, and they arrive in clouds when I start spraying down stuff, but when I put out sugar water they ignore it, even tho they are often clearly starving. (They look poor and weak.)
I used to work for a beekeeper, tho mainly in the honey house. If most folks could see honey at that stage, they'd never eat it. :)
Yes, bumblebees often crawl around on the ground, and nest below the surface. But honeybees don't. And it's not really typical for honeybees to rest on the ground for long periods.
They are are pretty hard to mistake for one another, if you've even a vague idea of what each looks like. And only honeybees have a big economic impact. (You like to eat? Then you should like bees!)
Then I noticed the filename and imemdiately thought, "That's no bee, it's Thumbelina!!"
There's a wild beehive somewhere on my place (never have found it, tho it might be high up in one of the old hollow trees) and being we're in the desert, a lot of the year they clearly do not get enough to eat (lots of them being small or weak). But they've completely ignored the sugar water I've put out for them. [I used to work for a beekeeper, so I knew to do this.]
I don't recall if consumables are covered by First Sale (all I remember offhand is that it was meant for books) but...
The Army might want to check out my truck. Its Ford factory-original puke-green paint (just about the same colour as Donnagel, come to think of it) is absolutely invisible under yellow sodium lights. You can lose the thing in an otherwise-empty sodium-lit parking lot, as I discovered one year when I was last one out of the Long Beach Convention Center.
Now all we need is a way to illuminate battlefields with sodium lights, then paint all our troops and equipment that pale Ford puke-green. Great for sneak attacks! ;)
Oh, I see... the camera is actually high-resolution. They're gonna save a bundle on production costs!!
And that's all dandy -- IF they pay me to be part of their audience demographics study!
What's the name of that U.S. law that forbids a seller from dictating what brand of consumables the purchaser uses? One wonders at what point the DMCA type shit will collide with that.
If the Army's radar is pointed at a domestic road, they need to review the Constitution!
"You could go to jail or face $20,000 for owning a modded XBox."
No, no, no.
"You could go to jail or face $20,000 for modding an XBox that you BOUGHT, PAID FOR, AND OWN."
Next up, jail time for painting your car an unlicensed colour.
Damned good points, and We The People south of the 49th should remember that as well, since our own gov't has forgotten that we are CITIZENS, and now sees us only as REVENUE SOURCES. And of course, when lobbying interests get into the act, that's REVENUE -- into politicians' warchests and into the corps' bank accounts.
Good point. And I would posit that even non-privatized programs like SocSec are at the mercy of corporations -- if retired folks don't get paid SocSec, Medicaid, and have no money, who will keep the elderly-oriented industries in business??
Me neither... but the flipside is that I no longer buy music, unless I can find it used.
So instead of getting SOME money from me, they get NO money from me.
Interesting point re speeding vs filesharing. Probably about the same proportional risk, but the penalties are disproportionate by several orders of magnitude, and inversely proportional to the risks they put on others.
The ones I've known have been about middling, far as I could tell (been around 'em, haven't personally trained 'em). They've also been very calm, sensible dogs (good house pets), which can make a dog look dimmer than it really is. Definitely more wattage than the Borzois and Afghans I've worked with (which are good at their jobs, but rather lacking in thought processes), but the Asian sighthounds are a different type of dog.
The first dog I was ever paid to train was a Borzoi. Sweet dog but a waste of air when it came to learning anything!
Actually, I used to work with a wide variety of breeds. I wound going mainly with Labs because they were easier to live with, harder to screw up, less work for more gain, and I could do more interesting things with them. And I don't like dim dogs much, nor do I care for those that lack the desire to work FOR people.
Success often means the right dog for a specific existing program. The same bias exists in, frex, fieldtrial retrievers -- an "Amish-bred" dog will probably not do well in a wholly collar-conditioning program, and v.v., no matter how good or poor the dog is otherwise. One of the brightest lines in the breed pretty much died out in the 1970s-80s, because at the time an "Amish" style dog was ruined by the conditioning programs of the day, no matter how much more brains and talent it had, so were not successful and were not bred from. Conversely some very dim animals were very successful in that program (including NFCs).
See, one of the problems with most trainers is that they are not breeders, and consequently they don't see beyond today's success, to what it might be doing to the breed tomorrow. I look at it from the other way round -- it's only success if it preserves the breed's best and most correct attributes, whatever those may be. And what's good and successful in, say, a SchIII Dobe would be a disaster in a hunting dog, and v.v.
But I don't happen to like dealing with that end of the species. YMMV.
What I was referring to was that if Downs children have surgery early on, to correct the mouth/tongue defects that render speech difficult for them, they develop far better mentally than if they don't get this intervention. Apparently the ability to produce feedback (ie. to talk) is a huge influence on how well a child's brain develops. One has to wonder how it might influence a dog, since a few DO try to "talk" (make clear attempts to imitate human speech) but obviously cannot form words as such.
I have to agree with that. AI might be useful where it's impossible to send either a human or a trained animal, but the problem with AI is judgment calls that fall outside its programming (which even animals, if trained rather than operant-conditioned, can manage to some degree). Do we really want Colossus in charge of world peace?? I certainly don't.
I've had a dog that grokked that sex = puppies (either for herself or for another bitch -- she wanted to steal the resulting puppies). I've seen dogs try to train other dogs. I've seen them do some fairly complex multi-level problem-solving, play practical jokes, deliberately deceive, etc, etc. And many can figure stuff out from only seeing it once, or from watching someone else's efforts (including learning from another's futility). As with children, there is a considerable influence from simply being around someone who talks to them and interacts, so they can pick up ordinary everyday speech and actions.
It's not the same style of intelligence as what modern education brings out in a human child (and the lack of opposable thumbs and a speech-capable tongue imposes certain limits), but it's very much the same level of thinking and comprehension as childrens' "playground learning" (which BTW we now know is critical to a child's ability to assimilate what it learns in more structured environments).
German Shepherds are not, contrary to popular belief, very well up on the canine intelligence scale. They condition fairly well and don't get as hung up in that (to the point of being unable to do anything else) as a Dobe, but they certainly don't think to the degree that, say, the working retrievers do.
BTW despite my profession I am not a "dog lover", which I agree clouds many folks' objectivity -- once they start regarding 'em as "fur kids" they start reading in stuff that ain't there. All you gotta do is look at cat freaks to see that... most cats are bloody retards compared even to dim dogs. I like my cats, but sometimes I swear if they had two brain cells, they'd have a synapse! Once in a blue moon a genuinely smart one comes along, but it's not the norm, nor is it in any primarily instinct-driven species (or breed, come back to dogs -- some of the primitives are damned dim bulbs).
Haha... I've seen that type eat 5-6 pounds of dog food at a crack just to prevent another dog from getting any. Definitely NOT the type I want in my kennel! Ain't nothin' but trouble, and after a certain point, not worth trying to, uh, communicate with.
Actually, some male dogs are better "mothers" than the pups' dams are. I've had several that actively parent puppies. This behaviour is most prevalent in smart dogs with more desire to please humans. OTOH, with the more wolflike dogs ... well, I wouldn't let the average male, or worse yet an unbred female, NEAR puppies, if I wanted to keep them alive.
Here's one of my stud dogs (who is from the 10th generation of my own line) with a litter that he mostly raised (other than the feeding part); the pups are about 8 weeks old in the photo. http://home.earthlink.net/~rividh/kennel/litters/sirius_and_his_lambs.jpg
Haha, been there, done that :)
But if you run into one that lacks the "nice switch" (or more accurately the "Okay, you ARE the boss, now we're all in agreement" switch) -- and they do exist -- you have to be willing to take it as far as necessary. The message with the down-on-your-back trick is "I am willing to KILL you if you don't behave" and the dog has to believe it. Most believe instantly, no violence required, and they are much the happier for it, since dogs need to KNOW their place in life to feel secure. With those few that are wired like Cool Hand Luke... well, you have to be willing to demonstrate that you will take it as far as necessary, or all they've learned is that if they resist long enough, they can get away with it.
Dogs can learn complex visual signals; indeed, many will learn such signals more easily than voice commands. It's a short hop from a hand signal to a visual cue that's marks on paper. Some dogs may even figure out that it's variable, and interpret accordingly. I've seen dogs that could stack up to 3 unrelated commands, and any mature fieldtrial retriever remembers at least 4 related tasks at a time (frex a quad mark with a blind up the middle). What is reading? Stacking of tasks, if for the eye and brain rather than the hand or foot.
Actually, this might be a good approach for certain assistance dogs, should there be a disabled human for whom writing, or typing and sending to the printer, are more feasible than giving voice or hand signals. Dog hears printer working, goes to look, visual signal is printed on the paper. It wouldn't matter if it was the word "newspaper" or a picture of a bundle, whatever "language" you cared to use would do.
Dogs can do signal mixing too -- I once had a poodle that I'd trained in English, Spanish, and hand signals. I could use or even mix all three at random and it never confused her.
As you note, desire to please makes a huge difference in how any intelligence (whether present or absent) is directed and used.
The Oriental breeds tend to be 'street smart' in a survival-oriented way, but utterly lacking that connection with humans that we see as the desire to please -- to sublimate the dog's own desires and instincts in favour of what the human wants. Desire to please tends to negate dominance games too, because obviously the one who IS dominant is the one who deserves to be pleased, and the one who is the underling does the pleasing. But "If I don't believe you're in charge, why should I do something for you if I don't feel like it, or if the bribe isn't worth it?" You can sometimes lead such dogs around by their stomachs, but what happens when you don't have that bribe to hand, or the dog isn't hungry??
Bt the biggest problem with food training is that it inverts the master/servant relationship: In a normal relationship (ie. the way dogs -- and humans! -- are hardwired) the underling ALWAYS offers the bribe to the master, who then *may* graciously give part of it back to the servant (here represented by the dog). With food training, every "reward" informs the dog that the DOG is the boss. This confuses dogs that really want to please, and convinces dominant dogs that they are indeed in charge. And now we have a whole generation of food-trained dog owners who can't control their pets -- a problem that before the food-training craze was NOT the norm. (Do you hear an echo of the nanny state? I do.)
If at some point you're forced to physically discipline or restrain a dog with a Chow-type temperament, or interfere with what it wants (such as if a child sticks its hand into the food bowl), very often the result is that you get bitten, because they can't or won't tolerate being thwarted. There will be no warning when this happens.
That's all dandy if the dog belongs to a tribe of yak herders and largely fends for itself on the Siberian steppes; survival in that environment requires putting your own welfare FIRST (desire to please doesn't enter into it, so is not selected for). Not so good if you're a household with little kids. It doesn't help that we civilized folk been taught to never do the natural thing and just deck a dog that shows a dangerous level of dominance (exactly what another dog would do, for that matter).