True Facts: Bees That Play With Balls And Do Math!

this episode sponsored by brilliant learn to think if you have ever seen a bee you have probably noticed that they are not the largest animals and therefore are endowed with a brain appropriate to their smallness here is the brain of a bee. Honestly, it looks pretty big on the screen like this, but this Xbox controller, which is apparently what controls a bee, only has about 960,000 neurons compared to the roughly 100 billion neurons in a human brain. that's the B brain for climbing anyway, with stats like that you would expect a bee to suck on their Scrabble, which they do, but they can remember directions to a flower a mile away, not sure about I can do that and they can learn which flowers have the good. sauce, this bee here, for example, learned that those yellow third grade arts and crafts flowers had better nectar to drink, while the blue ones had better pollen to rub all over them.

It's the best day of that pipe cleaner's life. I know what you're doing. Thinking big, learning to distinguish flowers is like the main business of being a bee, of course, they're going to throw a couple hundred thousand neurons at something important like that, but what if things get a little different? a little more complicated? Look at this Puck in the middle of this Puck there is a pacifier with some sugar juice and the

bees

love the sugar juice now of course if you put a lid on top of the sugar juice you will get some discouraged

bees

but If you take that lid and cover just a little bit of that food hole and then every time the bee comes back, you cover it a little bit more until it's totally covered, you get some bees that maybe complain on Yelp about the restaurant at the same time. that go, but also bees that gradually figure out that you can push that lid out and once you get the fire going, some of them actually get to pushing, okay Millie, you did it, now you can stop these bees, which are quite intelligent, but if you train them with a differently shaped cap and then introduce them to both. types of lids that will push the way they were first trained regardless of which one is covering the sugar hole, so they are learning, but they are not getting the full picture, but pushing things out is pretty normal for a Las Bee flowers like the black locust don't just give up pollen, you have to force it open, so how about we learn something new that doesn't involve pushing?

Here are some flowers. I'm doing air dates. They have a hole in the middle with sugar and everything is under a clear cover, but there is a rope attached that you can pull to reach it. Now you give this setup to a group of bumblebees and not much happens, there's a lot of buzzing. What I mean could be because the flowers look like shit, they didn't even draw petals on them. I know, scientists didn't have the guts to go to art school, but still, anyway, you might find the odd bee, one in 100, something like that. You can figure this out the first time, but you know, those kind of bees that get drunk the night before the SAT, but most of the rest of us are sorry that they need a little help, but what you can do is train them by gradually pushing. the flow under the lid and that way they learn to pull the string to get the juice is not bad and listen once they learn it, they are champions at it.

I mean, you want to give them a job, but get this, you take another one. bee that doesn't know how to do it, put it in a box and let it watch train B pull the rope, now let it get out of the box and you know what it would learn by watching, now train B can still do something. things that this one may not like if you add additional threads so that the flower does not move immediately train B keeps pulling until it works the one who learned by observing simply gives up so some things are not transmitted but this way they can teach each other some very complex things.

Here's a bee trained to solve a two-step puzzle where you only get the reward at the end and another bee can learn just by watching. He seems like a slightly upset student. He gets into the oh now he's gone vaping, okay, I'm back, blue thing, red thing, I got it, I know what you're thinking, what's up with the

balls

? Listen, what you have heard is

true

. Bees love

balls

, just like before I showed them. You wonder about how smart they are. You should know that bees love balls. If you make a clear path from a bee nest to the food, there is nothing in the way, but to get there, the bees have to go through what is essentially a B-size Chuck. -E-Cheese Ball Pit, se They stop and

play

with those damn balls, not for any reward or anything, they

play

with balls, so it's not surprising that you can train a bee to play a round of mini golf and watch them train. they with a little bee puppet on a stick and when they put the ball in the middle they get a sugar snack and eventually they get the hang of it look at this one, she throws it so hard she does a somersault and says, come on She hit the middle, where is my sugar?

Anyway, now you have the train to teach a novice bee how to put the ball in a hole, but this time you have three balls and the two closest ones are stuck together, so now he has to use the one furthest away. You let the beginner try it on his own and you don't hit any of the balls and you know what he uses the ball that was closest to the middle for, the one that gives you the prize the fastest even though it was trained. a different ball that is innovation now this allows knowledge to spread through an entire colony of bees teaching other bees that is what shows how that ability to pull strings from before went from A to B to B to B yeah you like this program and you like to learn how Please visit shiny.org. shiny is a free and easy way to learn

math

ematics and computer science.

They've been sponsors of factual events for a long time because I think they're great at teaching the course how technology works, for example. helps you understand the things you interact with every day. You can find out why the passwords you've been using aren't the right ones and how to create a good one. There are lessons about how recommendation algorithms work and why you suddenly watch all those pingpong videos. In your feed it turns out there are a lot of options for you and then there are lessons on how to compress those pingpong videos to smaller file sizes without losing quality and if all this inspires you to change careers, you can use brilliant to learn how to code with courses like programming with Python or thinking in code.

It's amazing to try everything shiny has to offer for free for a full 30 days. Visit shiny.org zfrank or click the link in the description. You'll also get a 20% annual discount. premium subscription start learning get inspired look brilliant today where were we? Oh right, it makes sense that bees can share knowledge. I mean, bees are social butterflies. Well, they are bees, but they all live together. They have to have some complicated rooms in the middle of meetings like. who is going to do the shopping or in this example how to choose the location of a new home, now out of about 10,000 bees only a couple hundred of them are scouts and the scouts go out and look for a good location, maybe a good hole. now if they find something they come back with instructions but they don't blame him they do it through interpretive dance it's like a mime had to give directions to the porta potty at Coachella that's how it works they do this kind of thing with figs right and when they pass by the center they shake their this already contains a ton of information, it's like the morse code of twerking, the direction they move while shaking it corresponds to the direction of the location, look, they're doing this.

On a vertical surface, the direction up means directly towards the sun, down is away from the Sun, so this direction here is like 5:00 from the Sun. Now the distance to the location is how long they shake it, It is approximately 1000 M for every second. of shaking apparently apply, they bought the metric system now you might be thinking how the hell do these bees know how far they flew well at one point they thought the bees were measuring the energy they used to get there so they put small weights on the bees to see If he changed his estimates and you know what he mainly demonstrated: you shouldn't put weights on the bees now there's a group of bees with muscular calves walking around again they put these tents as landmarks on the way from a hive to a feeder and then they changed the number of landmarks, which seemed to confuse some of the bees, so now the bees can count well, it seems that they can especially reduce the numbers.

Here's one, avoiding four and landing on two. Here's one they were taught to tell the difference. between 11 and 12, you can give them two scenarios and train them to choose the largest or the smallest in this scenario. Watch it, go back and forth just to be sure, perfectionist B and if you train him to choose the largest number, he won. Not only will they choose the one with the most shapes, they will also choose one with the same number of shapes, but when the shapes themselves are bigger, it's like the concept of bigger and look at this if you train them to choose the smallest thing that they recognize. nothing is smaller than something, I mean, that's the concept of zero in this, if B sees yellow shapes, he's trained to go in and look for the panel with one less than the number of shapes outside, damn subtraction if the color of the shapes is blue. the be knows how to add one to the number i mean they can do

math

you probably just knew about their spelling kill me but discrete counting doesn't seem to be what helps them judge distances instead they seem to use something called optical flow which is something like the speed at which things pass by in your field of vision and if you know that's how bees measure things, you can screw them down, put them in a tunnel, for example, with stripes on the ground as you pass over the stripes, measure the distance and swings an appropriate axe.

Now you do the same thing, except in this case the stripes move, so when the bee flies, it thinks it's covering a lot more ground and tells its friends about a location that is miles away, meanwhile, you put a horizontal line and nothing changes as you fly over it, they don't know how far they went and this explains, by the way, why bees often drown if they fly over still water. You can see this effect using a Also in the mirror, the bee keeps getting closer to the ground to try to discern any movement, but all there is is a reflection of a stationary bee, so you can see that it's still sunken into the ground anyway.

In addition to distance and direction, there is one more thing that seems to be communicated in this dance, the bee's estimate of how good the location it is in seems to be related to how often it makes the move. dance followed. If she thinks she's found something great, she just keeps going and then there are bees like this. one who doesn't seem very excited flew about 3 feet and found a shoe now the reason for going on and on about a good location is because bees eventually have to choose a location for the new home, so these dances aren't just about the instructions, it's all about marketing, if you find a good location you try to convince other Scouts to check it out and then you dance around as you do until there's enough to make the decision and listen since you've stayed so long.

I'll tell you. You, another thing, all this communication about distance, location and quality happens mostly inside a hive in the dark, drop the mic, little bee, drop the mic, you think the bee likes honey , no, no, Be Love cannot tempt you to be with her. your money no no no love