The Science of Bees: How they Communicate & Influence Biotechnology

Honey bees communicate using vector calculus and directional- mamba!! A forager uses dance to communicate the position of nectar sources she discovered.

If the dance is in straight lines towards the upper part of the hive, that means the flowers or source of food can be found by following the sun's position.

If the dance is downwards, towards the bottom of the hive, that means the flowers will be found by traveling away from the sun.

If the bees dance left or right, that will indicate the direction of the blooming nectar source- in relation to the sun. For instance, a 45° angle to the left of the hive's top will indicate a corresponding direction to take towards the sun and find flowers.

The duration of the bee's dance and the amount of vibrations in that dance describe exactly the proximity of the nectar source from the colony- the longer the dance, the further away the flowers.

Want your mind blown even more? Then check this out: Every 4 minutes the sun's angle shifts by a single degree- so you would think bee's directions, after 15 minutes of flight and 10 minutes of description to the colony would be off- but that's not the case!

Every four minutes, directly corresponding to the sun's path in the sky, the bees will adjust their dance so their directions are always timely... Scientists have even been using bees to help further the development of facial recognition technology.... what??? Read on.

Biotechnology is a relatively young field of scientific study. Scientists and engineers approach tech problems using biological life forms as a basis for solutions.

Do you know how to requeen a struggling hive?

What's that mean? It means they mechanize lifelike forms. For instance, engineers are currently working on a way to produce commercial volumes of spider silk. This versatile material will go into everything from body armor to medical bandages.

So how does a bee fit into the biotech industry? It's all in the eyes.

Problem:

"There have been a lot of difficulties in producing algorithms that can reliably recognize faces when there is a change in viewpoint.  For example, a field test of an artificial intelligence face recognition system at a major airport in the United States produced so many false positives that the system was practically not useable in crowded situations: which is when it is needed to work best.

Knowing how biological systems cope with these types of visual challenges can potentially provide some insights for software developers about new or novel types of approach."  (From an interview with Australian bee researcher Adrian Dyer, available from the Humboldt Foundation)

Solution:

Teaching an animal a task, like sign language or maze training, was usually thought to only be possible in larger brained animals. However, research of the worker bee has given techies a whole new host of ideas.

The worker bee, "she," is an altruistic being. She goes out to collect nectar from flowers and returns to the hive to feed the entire colony of bees. So when researchers sought to train bees to do complex tasks, like recognize 3D facial images, there was an obvious benefit.

Once the bee's honey stomach was full, she would return to the hive, deposit her nectar- and go back to the experiment. That's a quick turnaround time over say, a rat, who has to learn through food- and then gets full.

Tech researchers have begun to examine the bee's vision, which sees one pixel per ommatidia (or single eye), and are looking at pairing that pixel with an algorithm relating it back to "center command" of a larger computer system to be ingested and processed to form whole images.

Like nectar, these millions of small images will be reformulated into a larger image pattern and used in everything from door locks to security controls.- pretty cool stuff from a furry little bee, eh?

The way a bee sees could be the next advancement in the way humans use facial recognition technologies-- that's pretty cool. If you have any questions use the form below and reach out to us. We'll work to get back to you within 24-hours.