Post #15108

Bumblebees: Not just biorobots. New data on the fantastic intelligence of these insects Who would have thought that bumblebees are so full of surprises? We have already told you that they survived the nuclear bombing of the test site,] told how they took the work of farmers onto their fragile chitinous shoulders and now [https://vk.com/wall-82267971_1417906|bring them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But that’s where neither we nor bumblebees are not going to stop! Right now, thanks to bumblebees, a small scientific revolution is taking place! They prove to us that insects are not mindless biorobots, but developed living beings who can communicate, learn new things, exchange experiences and even play! It all started in 2022, when a mixed team of Finnish and English zoologists decided to conduct an interesting experiment. They placed a hive of bumblebees in a controlled environment, where they had to wade through a chamber of small balls to get to a saucer of sweet nectar. The balls were the most ordinary, they did not smell of food, and no reward or punishment was given for rolling them. And you would know what started there! Every, absolutely every foraging bumblebee rolled balls at least once a day, and some of them spent up to an hour doing this activity! And even when the balls were moved to another room, and the bumblebees had to make a detour to get to them, they still flew to any of their toys! Centuries of animal observations have shown us that developed play behavior is a sign of an animal with a flexible mind that learns well and easily changes its behavior, and bumblebees have excellent learning abilities. In one experiment, bumblebees were taught to roll a ball into the center of a platform to obtain syrup. In another, you pull a string to get a saucer with a tasty treat from under the glass. And zoologists from the University of London taught their charges to pull two levers at once in order to remove the barrier that does not allow access to food. And in all cases, the insects did not simply mechanically repeat learned actions, but analyzed the surrounding space and changed their strategy. For example, they rolled the lightest ball out of several offered onto the platform or ignored a saucer of the wrong color, which turned out to be empty over and over again. And most importantly, they shared information with each other. Over time, scientists noticed that it was enough to teach just one bumblebee the trick, and after a few weeks the whole family would master it on their own, without human contact. It turned out that young bumblebees, on their first trips for nectar, follow their more experienced relatives and remember all their actions, adopting useful habits. In other words, insects with a brain of only a couple of million cells are able to transmit information from generation to generation, forming a stable cultural tradition. But we used to believe that