I wanted to announce to everyone that there is a Science and Faith conference in Dallas, Texas coming this weekend. And there’s live streaming. I have watched all the videos from the previous ones. It’s much better to watch and listen to them than to just listen to them, because of the slides. Anyway, one of the previous talks was about honeybees, and I blogged about it. BUT there is even more interesting design evidence in honeybees. Let’s investigate.

So, in my last post, I talked about the design of honeybees.

But here is the latest on the honeybees, from Science and Culture.

First, here is the topic – bee selection of flowers for efficient collection of nectar:

Animals are constantly faced with having to make behavioral decisions. An example is when they forage — searching for food. Bee behavior when questing for pollen and nectar has been a favorite subject for biologists to study. One reason is that rather than searching randomly for flowers, bees exhibit clear tendencies and preferences. Research has determined that bees use information about flower characteristics to make their foraging decisions.

Various aspects of bee foraging have been the subject of experiments. There are a number of factors that affect their decisions on where and when to forage. Bees typically have to choose between “Several dozen flower species which all differ in reward and signal, and they may encounter several flowers with different signals per second of flight.” Bees have been shown to be flexible, adjusting their decision-making behavior based on the conditions they encounter. One piece of information that bees use in foraging is the depth of the flower, which affects the time required to forage (called handling time). Flowers of shallow depth require less handling time, which can be viewed as a trade-off cost, and thus are more efficient. Other things being equal, bees generally prefer flowers of shallow depth with, therefore, reduced handling time. It has also been shown that bees prefer flowers that provide a greater reward (i.e., more nectar) if handling time is not a factor. Some experiments have shown that bees have a distinct preference for flowers with optimum concentrations of nectar. Bees also show a preference for continuing to forage on flowers of the same color, sometimes even when flowers of a different color offer superior rewards.

And here is the new study about this:

A recent paper from the University of Sheffield in the UK studied foraging by honeybees (Apis mellifera), analyzing their decision-making process, including an assessment of their accuracy and efficiency.

[…]In the experiment, honeybees were trained to associate different colors with either a reward or punishment, and with a range of probabilities.

[…]Key findings from the experiment include that for tests which were intended to provide easy discrimination between reward and punishment, the bees made the correct choice significantly more often than mere chance would lead us to expect.

[…]The authors indicate that the study, “Unveils the remarkable sophistication and subtlety of honeybee decision-making.” They also comment that the sophistication of honeybee decision-making has features in common with primates. That is all the more remarkable given the small size of their brains (less than 1 million neurons). These behaviors are largely controlled by a segment of the brain called mushroom bodies, which contain multisensory integration, learning and memory formation, and comprise about 40 percent of the brain neurons. In comparison, the brains of goldfish and hummingbirds are roughly 100 times larger. Despite the small size of the bee’s brain, expert Lars Chittka has documented the significant repertoire of honeybee behaviors, many that involve decision-making.

Very good article, and shows evidence of design in animals. I am a bird person myself, but bees have wings, so I guess I can like them, too. Certainly they are cute and offer a great case for intelligent design.

By the way, I recently bought a whole bunch of books for one of my co-workers who has 5 kids. I decided that it would be good for the kids to be exposed to apologetics evidence. One of the books was about the design of the human body. So, if you have kids that are aged 8-12 or so, you might want to check this book out. It’s never too early for kids to get serious about evidence that will help them choose and defend the truth.

And of course there is a new book for grown-ups that just came out written by a super-qualified engineer from the UK. I blogged about that one here.