Animals vs. Hipsters

Coming up for air after spending the last month or so in a push to meet my book deadline, even I am a bit shocked at what animals have been getting away with when they think my attention is diverted.

I don't blame them for upping their efforts. They only have till next fall before the lid is blown off their activities in a full length expose by a major New York publisher. They should, after all, be quaking in their paws.

In the meantime, unfortunately, clueless humans are continuing to both enable and be surprised by their bad behavior, like the urban beekeepers in Brooklyn who were astonished to find that their bees were producing honey that was bright red instead of amber.

Another strange new bee disease? No: it's simply that if you're going to bring bees into the city, of course they're going to take advantage of urban amenities.

We've already seen that bees love alcohol even more than college students do. Scientists have also found that given the choice, bees prefer nectar that is spiked with caffeine and nicotine. And we know that animals can become junk food junkies.

So readers of this blog won't be surprised at the solution to the Mystery of the Red Honey in Red Hook: apparently the bees have been dining on the syrup at a local maraschino cherry factory.

Of course, naive nature-lovers who don't read this blog were incredulous, as reported by the New York Times:

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

I guess you have to expect this kind of delusional thinking from someone who not only has the usual ignorance about the real nature of animals, but is also an advocate of "slow food." But seriously, get real. How many hungry humans are digging up dandelion roots in Prospect Park instead of making reservations at one of Brooklyn's many fine dining establishments - or grabbing a Twinkie at the corner bodega? Why do you expect bees to work any harder?


Coney Island bees by Flickr user mercurialn.

Updates: Animals behaving humanly

We reported recently on a cat that took the ferry to Spain from England. Concern that this was a symptom of a bigger problem was confirmed by our crack bad behavior research team, which dug up two stories about dogs that take the subway in Moscow. One, in the Financial Times, quotes extensively from a biologist that studies the packs of stray dogs living in the city:

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised that these strays have their human enablers:

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

Dogs aren't the only lazy animals who've gotten the idea that human transportation is a good deal. We've previously seen a bird trying to hitch a ride on a plane, and now there's also this video of a pigeon taking the subway in Toronto.

These animals might be interested to know what happened to a cat in England who took the same bus every day for four years: he was killed by a hit and run driver while crossing the road to get to the bus stop. His owner was quoted in the Daily Mail:

She said: 'Casper was quite quick for his age but I was trying to stop him from riding the bus so much.

'He had no road sense whatsoever but he loved people.

'He'd queue up in line good as gold - it'd be 'person, person, person, cat, person, person'.'

Sad, but instructive. As we humans well know, taking advantage of our transportation technology has its downsides. Maybe animals - who can already run, climb, swim and fly better than we can - should stick to what they're good at.

Moving on: this video from Japan, always on the forefront of treating animals humanly, shows a family that sends its pet penguin to the grocery store on its own. We have to grant that at least this penguin is pulling its weight in the household more than most animals do.

The Japanese are probably also not helping matters by believing that some of their cats can actually speak.

A final quick addition to a topic we have been following: add cigarettes and coffee to the list of substances that bees like to abuse, which already included bees alcohol and cocaine. Scientists in Israel found that they also prefer nectar that is spiked with caffeine and nicotine.


Dog on the Moscow metro by Flickr user Adam Baker.

That'll show 'em

Bees. We're supposed to appreciate them for pollinating our food, and be in a panic about a mysterious disease affecting them. We're also supposed to be impressed that these tiny creatures have an amazing communication system, where they're able to direct their hivemates to food using a complex dance.

I was pleased to run across this comic for those of us who are tired of being told to be impressed by animals, suggesting a way to take it out on bees:



(Click the cartoon for larger version, or see the original at Abstruse Goose.)

As we saw earlier, of course, the dance might not be all it's cracked up to be. Check out another cartoon where the bees agree here.

I can't hear what you're saying with this buzzing in my ears

The wiggle dance of the bees: one of the wonders of evolution. Imagine these tiny creatures, their brains probably the size of the head of a pin (I'm guessing, I'm doing all the rest of the work here, YOU go look it up) communicating the location of food to their hivemates with a complex choreography indicating direction relative to the position of the sun and distance correlating to the duration of the dance.

It's an uncontroversial fact about the amazing abilities of animals. Or is it? According to a recent article in New Scientist, some researchers have begun to have doubts. They claim that under controlled experimentation where bees can't also use cues like smell, they - like many of us - don't seem to be exactly paying attention:

A litany of recent evidence suggests that while bees can follow the dance, they often fail to decode it properly, or ignore it completely.

In one study, Grüter and his colleague Walter Farina of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina found that among bees that attend to a dance, 93 per cent ignore the instructions and head to a food source they already know about (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 275, p 1321). Similarly, bees often seem unable to follow the instructions. Some watch more than 50 runs and make several sorties out of the hive but never find the food.

The result of this is that some scientists downplay the importance of the dance as a method of communication, but these scientists clearly know little about bad behavior. Your spouse or teenager may ignore your request to take out the trash, and your idiot friend may disregard your recommendation for a fantastic Thai restaurant and head straight to McDonald's, and we all know people who can't follow directions to save their lives. No one concludes from that, that human language isn't a valid communication system, right? We already know that bees are drunks and druggies, so what do you expect?


Thanks to Misterqueue that I didn't have to go out and take my own picture of a bee this time.

Boozing bees, part 2: "Not even a college student."

In our last post, we saw the effects of lab-induced drug abuse in bees, which were oddly reminiscent of the effects in humans. But how is that behavior the fault of the bees, you may ask?

Well, they may only get cocaine in labs. But in nature, alcohol is actually their drug of choice.

According to an artice in New Scientist ("Driven to Drink: A Sorry Tale of Bees' Boozy Life," August 8, 1992, p. 14), honey bees drinking fermented nectar have more flying accidents, die younger and are often rejected by teetotalers back at the hive. An Australian entomologist, Dr. Errol Hassan, is looking at bees imbibing both fermented sugar syrup and nectar. The alcohol content can be as high as 10% in these materials and adding fermented syrup or nectar to honey can make it "spiked."

The observation that bees are attracted to alcohol on their own goes back many years, as in this article from the New York Times of Dec 26 1898

The bee, like its human brother, is a frail and temptable creature, whose usefulness depends on absolute abstemiousness... According the credible accounts, the Cuban honey bee, to some extent, has fallen a victim to strong drink. The "workers" find it much nicer to congregate around the sugar mills, where they are always sure to discover sweet juices in ample supply. At first the bees carry on their labors diligently. Then, little by little, they learn that juices from the sugar cane contain alcohol...

Forsaking even the semblance of work, the bees imbibe the intoxicating fluid, and thenceforth the social and mental decline is marked. The sad fact is that the bees get drunk. They fly about in a dazed and listless condition, ambitionless so far as honey making is concerned. Once they have drunk from the fountain of Bacchus, they are moral and physical degenerates.

So researchers are merely taking advantage of their natural tendencies, which they say is exceedingly easy:

Most animals have to be tricked into drinking alcohol, says Charles Abramson of Ohio State University. But a honeybee will happily drink the equivalent of a human downing 10 litres of wine at one sitting.

"We can get them to drink pure ethanol, and I know of no organism that drinks pure ethanol - not even a college student," he says.

But don't try this at home - remember, these are trained professionals. Don't mess with bees!

Substance abusing bees, part 1

Recent research shows that honey bees that are given cocaine dance more - which may not be surprising - but there's more to it than it sounds at first, because remember that for bees, dancing isn't about partying, it's about communication:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2008) — In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.

Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they've found high quality nectar or pollen, and only when the hive is in need. They do this by performing a dance, called a "round" or "waggle" dance, on a specialized "dance floor" in the hive. The dance gives specific instructions that help the other bees find the food.

Foraging honey bees on cocaine are more likely to dance, regardless of the quality of the food they've found or the status of the hive, the authors of the study report.

(Click here for a less restrained look into the mind of bees on coke, from this week's New Yorker.)

Bees have also been used to study the effects of alcohol, and the effect likewise sound awfully familiar.

"Alcohol affects bees and humans in similar ways – it impairs motor functioning along with learning and memory processing," said Julie Mustard, a study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher in entomology at Ohio State University.

Researchers gave honey bees various levels of ethanol, the intoxicating agent in liquor, and monitored the ensuing behavioral effects of the drink – specifically how much time the bees spent flying, walking, standing still, grooming and flat on their backs, so drunk they couldn't stand up.

...Not surprisingly, increasing ethanol consumption meant bees spent less time flying, walking and grooming, and more time upside down.

You might say that this doesn't count as bad behavior, because it wasn't the bees' choice to imbibe... but come back on Friday.

Partying bee by Flickr user Henrique Vicente.

Bad boy bees and prevaricating plants probably deserve each other

In belated recognition of Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, which took place on February 12th, we take a moment to consider some recent research into the pollination of orchids, the subject of some of his important early research.

Some orchids lure bees to pollinate them by tricking them into thinking they're going to get lucky - the flower imitates both the appearance and smell of a female bee.

An additional kink has been revealed in recent research, reported in New Scientist:

Orchid lures bees with the promise of sex with strangers.

Swiss researchers have discovered that the pheronomes used by the orchids actually don't smell exactly like the females in the local population of bees.

"This was not at all what we expected. If the orchids thrive on imitating female bees, the match should be as perfect as possible", says Schiestl.

Unless, of course, the males like their girls just a little bit different...

And indeed, male bees have the hots for exotic perfume. Given the choice between a dummy infused with the pheromone cocktail produced by the girl bee next door and another one with the bouquet of a female from another population, the males visited the scent that was new to them 50% more often.

But orchid scent, with yet greater differences in the pheromone mix, was even more popular. In choice tests it attracted males up to five times as often as that of a local female.

Don't miss the NSFW (if your co-workers are insects) video.

And more than you probably need to know about Pollination through Pseudo-Copulation in Orchids here.

(Photo, of a different species of bee orchid, by Wikipedia user Ramin Nasika.)