Whoever used the term ‘bee-brained’ to suggest stupidity didn’t know anything about bees.
Though the bee’s brain is about the size of a sesame seed, with one million neurones compared to our 86 billion, its function is remarkable, programming the bee to do things instinctively that we spend years learning to do, and probably do less efficiently.
Anatomically the small brain is in the head, but there are seven smaller nerve centres called ganglia in the thorax and abdomen which assume local control over muscular activity.
A beheaded bee can still move wings and legs but actions are uncoordinated.
And a beheaded bee, like a dying bee, can still sting!
The fluffy little bee emerging from its cell after three weeks of development doesn’t go to school, doesn’t have any mentoring, yet goes to work right away.
First is house cleaning, starting with her own cell and then to wider household duties.
Then throughout her six weeks or so of life she goes from one job description to another without a teacher or supervisor.
She next chews up the wax from the lids of vacated cells and uses this to cap other cells containing larvae maturing and ready after six days to be sealed as pupae.
How does she know when the larva is ready to be sealed? But she does.
Then she’s a nursery maid tending and feeding brood.
Later as a lady-in-waiting she looks after the queen, feeding and grooming her, in the process soaking up her influential pheromones and spreading them throughout the hive.
Late in her short life she ventures outside the hive to do the foraging, going on orientation flights to learn landmarks so she can return to the hive.
Here she does learn from older bees who tell her where to find the best sources of nectar.
By their dance routines they tell recruits the direction in relation to the sun, distance and quality of that newly found tree in bloom, or the field off flowering crops.
She reads that dance and learns to do it herself when her turn comes.
Such communication techniques are obviously imprecise, but in one experiment 89 per cent of bees present at a briefing found a close food source in five minutes.
I wish I was as accurate in interpreting directions my friends give me and my brain has so many more neurones.
Obviously the little bee brain is more efficient, but why would it not be?
The bee evolved millions of years ago and has changed little while we, mankind, have allegedly been our smart selves for only 200,000 years.
