There will never be enough said about the humble honeybee. They are an important part of many ecosystems, playing the part of pollinators and even producing the highly nutritious and delicious food consumed by many species—honey. New research reveals how these little creatures have been “engineered” over millions of years to make fast decisions that reduce risk.
Not only does the study published in the journal eLife yesterday give a better understanding of insect brains, but it can also help us understand how our own brains evolved and how to design better robots, according to Macquarie University. The research paper reveals a model of decision-making amongst bees and also outlines the paths in their brains that allow them to make fast decisions.
“Decision-making is at the core of cognition. It’s the result of an evaluation of possible outcomes, and animal lives are full of decisions. A honey bee has a brain smaller than a sesame seed. And yet she can make decisions faster and more accurately than we can. A robot programmed to do a bee’s job would need the backup of a supercomputer,” said Andrew Barron, corresponding author of the study, in a press statement. Barron is a professor at the university.
According to Barron, this investigation of the bees’ brains will help develop better drones that work autonomously. Most sufficiently advanced drones at the moment could be thought of as “brainless,” since they need to receive commands from somewhere else in order to function. But if the science that powers the sesame seed-sized brains of bees could somehow be translated into the world of drones, we could perhaps have much “smarter” drones, some even capable of working autonomously in remote locations like Mars.
Quick decision-making skills are essential for bees as they need to quickly and efficiently find nectar while avoiding predators to return to their hives. As they do this, there are many decisions they need to make, including “which flower will have nectar?”
The researchers first trained 20 bees to recognise “flower disks.” The blue-coloured ones always had sugar syrup while green flowers had quinine, which gave the bees a bitter taste. The other colours sometimes had glucose. After training the bees in such a way, they were released in a garden-like environment, where all flowers had just distilled water.
When the bees were confident that a particular flower had food, they landed almost immediately. If they were confident that the flower did not have water, they took a decision equally as quickly. The decisions were made in approximately 0.6 seconds each time. However, the bees did take more time when they were unsure of their decisions—about 1.4 seconds.
The researchers then built a computer model aiming to replicate the decision-making process. They found that the structure of the computer model looked very similar to the physical layout of a bee brain.
