Bees Can Recognize Faces

If You Swat, Watch Out: Bees Remember Faces
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
Published: February 1, 2010
from The New York Times

A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same way we do.

Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, a team of researchers report in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology.
“It’s a kind of gluing,” said Martin Giurfa, a professor of neural biology at the University de Toulouse, France, and one of the study’s authors.
It is the same ability, Dr. Giurfa said, that helps humans realize that a Chinese pagoda and a Swiss chalet are both abodes, based on their components.
“We know two vertical lines, with a hutlike top,” he said. “It’s a house.”
In their research, Dr. Giurfa and his colleagues created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not.
The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the nonfaces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls without sugar water, the bees kept returning to the sugar-filled bowls in front of the faces, the scientists found.
The images and the bowls were cleaned after every visit, to ensure that the bees were using visual cues to find the sugar and not leaving scent marks.
The researchers found that bees could also distinguish a face that provided sugar water from one that did not.
After several hours’ training, the bees picked the right faces about 75 percent of the time, said Adrian Dyer, another author of the study and a vision scientist at Monash University in Australia.
The researchers said that while they were biologists and not computer scientists, they hoped their work could be more widely used, including by face recognition experts. “If somebody else finds it interesting and it improves airport security, that’s great,” Dr. Dyer said. “The potential mechanisms can be made available to the wider facial recognition community.”
Dr. Giurfa said that the benefit of studying a creature as simple as the bee was in knowing that it did not take a complex neural network to distinguish objects. This could offer hope to technologists, he said.
“We could imagine that through repeat exposure, we may be able to train machines to extract a configuration and know that ‘This a motorbike’ or no, ‘This is rather a dog,’ ” he said.
But while the research on bees is interesting, it does not help with the most difficult problem technologists are having, said David Forsyth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, whose research focuses on computer vision.
That challenging problem is to build systems that can recognize the same people over a period of time, Dr. Forsyth said, after their hair has grown, or when they have sunglasses on, or after they have aged. These are all tasks that humans can usually perform but that computers struggle to replicate.
“I highly doubt that bees can tell the difference,” Dr. Forsyth said, adding, “If bees did that, I’d fall off my chair.”
Nonetheless, he said, it is important to add to the body of research on face recognition by studying animals.
While computers have become very capable at detecting faces, dependable face recognition by machines continues to be elusive.
“We know almost nothing about recognition, but it is really useful and really hard, and it helps us make decisions about the world,” Dr. Forsyth said. “Research into anything about identifying and recognizing seems to be a good thing.”

Bees conscripted to make conceptual art

bees hard at work on the figure of the martyred christ
image courtesy of carpenters workshop gallery

I am not a huge fan of conceptual art.  However, this piece fascinated me, not in its concept...blah blah blah religion and its endlessly toiling followers...blah blah blah, but in the mechanics of its construction.  Somehow the artist got these bees to build their comb on a human shaped armature, fill it with honey and then empty the honey back out into their own hive.  I would like to see some images of the piece in process.  Was it made in the gallery?  If so, how the heck did he make it so the bees could forage for the materials to build comb over the human form in the vitrine? Does the artist have beekeeping experience?  So many questions. 

From DesignBoom
June 22, 2010

tomas gabzdil libertiny: unbearable lightness
'unbearable lightness'
125 x 125 x 48 cm
in an edition of 6 + 2AP"
During design miami / basel 2010, carpenters workshop gallery (london) presented 'unbearable lightness' by dutch designer tomáš gabzdil libertiny. suspended on four chains and a hook, the small cabinet is a clean-room unit that has been built from custom aluminium profiles, glass sheets and plastic inserts, elements which are typically used in the automation industry.

For this specific event, the base plate of the glass was cut with a queen restrictor mesh. Over the course of the fair, 40 000 worker bees were released into the case to complete a wax honeycomb structure over the figure of a martyred christ rising out of the chaos, his weight seeming to be upheld by the mass strength of the swarm. the artist managed to gain complete control over the bees and lure them to construct their hive precisely over the figure within the vitrine that is made of a laser sintered framework. the industrious bees created a honeycomb skin over the figure before filling each cell with the honey they produce. then bees worked to remove the honey from the cells and return it to the beehive, cleaning the martyred christ back to the wax cells they originally created.





image courtesy of carpenters workshop gallery



bees hard at work
image courtesy of carpenters workshop gallery

Libertiny's allegory engages us with his desire to manipulate and control a social wild-life entity as the means to fulfilling the final product. here the bees,
engaging in their repetitive natural process while unknowingly creating the world's most recognized religious effigy. the suspended closed cabinet references the strict boundaries of society where the toil of everyday duty is masked by the hope of eternal rest in an after-life promised by the believer. the bees are programmed to act for their queen who puppet-rules for libertiny. the viewer is able to recognize this element of manipulation of the bees while ignorant to the invisible constraints and measures imposed on our own existence. initially, tomáš introduced a natural red pigment into the mold which bees spread evenly across the whole figure. the red relates to blood and flesh and is also the only color in the visible spectrum that bees do not see."



the honeycomb skin the bees created
image courtesy of carpenters workshop gallery



designer tomáš gabzdil libertiny
image courtesy of design miami / basel

image courtesy of carpenters workshop gallery

native bee?

Not sure who this little guy is but he sure loves lavender. 
I saw it flying around my front porch and luckily I had my macro lens handy. 

Bee City

A homey old film from 1951 by John Kieran's 'Kaleidiscope' films.
If this video does not work or is cropped go ahead and view it here.  And get lost in the vast array of amazing old films at the Prelinger Archives.

Electron Microscope Bee Photos

I found this amazing set of photos on Discover's website a few months ago and meant to get them posted here a lot sooner than now.     Upon further investigation I found the photographer,  Rose-Lynn Fisher's, website and was able to see even more of these beautiful photos.  

(pollen and antennae)

The photos are taken using a high-resolution scanning electron microscope which reveals breathtaking patterns and structures not seen by the human eye.  The artists said that when she first saw the image of the eye with its hexagonal pattern so similar to the pattern bees form their comb into she wondered if there was a correlation with the way the bees see and construct their the world and the way their eyes are constructed. 

(eye)

(antennae)

And the best news is that 60 photos are available in this book which came out in 2010...9 copies left on Amazon!  But really, buy it at your local bookstore.  They need your support more than Amazon does.  

Bee Math

Another helpful post from a local beekeeper on our San Francisco Beekeeper's email list serve:

 

All of the numbers about the life cycle of bees may seem irrelevant, so let's put them in a chart here and talk about what they are useful for. 

Caste   Hatch    Cap          Emerge 
Queen   3½ days  8 days +-1   16 days +-1  Laying        28 days +-5
Worker  3½ days  9 days +-1   20 days +-1  Foraging      42 days +-7
Drone   3½ days 10 days +-1   24 days +-1  Flying to DCA 38 days +-5 

If you find eggs, and no queen how long ago do you KNOW there was a queen? 
At least there was one three days ago and possibly is one now. 

If you find just hatched larvae and open brood but no eggs when was there a queen? 
Four days. 

If you put an excluder between two boxes and come back in four days and find eggs in one and not the other, what do you know? 
That the queen is in the one with eggs. 

If you find a capped queen cell, how long before it should have emerged for sure? 
9 days, but probably eight. 

If you find a capped queen cell, how long before you should see eggs from that queen? 
20 days. 

If you killed or lost a queen, how long before you'll have a laying queen again? 
24 days because the bees will start from a just hatched larvae. 

If you start from larvae and graft, how long before you need to transfer the larvae to a mating nuc? 
10 days. (day 14) 

If you confine the queen to get the larvae how long before you graft? 
Four days because some won't have hatched at the beginning for day 3. 

If you confined the queen to get the larvae how long before we have a laying queen? 
28 days. 

If a queen is killed and the bees raise a new one how much brood will be left in the hive just before the new queen starts to lay? 
None. It will take 24 or 25 days for the new queen (raised from a four day old) to be laying and in 21 days all the workers will have emerged and in 24 days all the drones will have emerged. 

If the queens starts laying today how long before that brood will be foraging for honey? 
42 days. 

You can see how knowing how long things take helps you predict where things are going or where things have been.  Sometimes you just have to figure best and worst case. For instance, an uncapped queen cell with a larvae in it is between four and eight days old (from the egg). A capped queen cell is between eight and sixteen days old. By looking at the tip of the cell you can tell one that is just capped (soft and white) from one that is about to emerge (brown and papery and often cleaned down to the cocoon by the workers). A soft white queen cell is between eight and twelve days old. A papery one is between thirteen and sixteen days old. The queen will emerge at sixteen (fifteen if it's hot out). She'll be laying by twenty eight days usually. 

Michael Bush

Spring Cleaning

San Francisco has been lashed by rain storm after rain storm this month.  There has not been one dry sunny day to go out and check on the bees.  I am leaving town for the month of April and need to get them set up for their spring buildup before I leave.  Usually I have a day or two in March to get some spring cleaning done.  Not this March.  Rain Rain Rain.

I have been reading about setting up swarm traps in spring.  Take your nastiest frames of moldy comb and fill up an old janky box and set it out somewhere in the sun, on top of a roof, anywhere that the scout bees might find it and they just might do you a favor and move into the box instead of the neighbor's attic.  They are attracted to the familiar smell of honeycomb.  It might catch a swarm from your own hives or maybe a swarm from out there in the world.  Just don't forget to check the boxes every week or so since you want to get them into your apiary as soon as you can.  Since they are in a box and not a tree or wall, all you have to do is move the box into your apiary after dark when all the field bees have returned.  Some beekeepers say that if you put a few blades of grass or a stick at the entrance it will alert the bees in the morning when they make their first trip out for the day that they are in a new spot and will need to reorient themselves to find the new hive when they are making their way back home.

I am excited to try this trick this spring.  Our hives usually swarm in April into the big fuchsia colored tea tree in the garden.  Convenient that it is not in a neighbor's yard, but still there is the whole rigmarole of getting up on the ladder and snipping the branch.  Every day this month I have been eying the sky worrying that the sun is going to pop out and trigger a big swarm event before I am ready for it. Or worse, that it will happen while I am gone! 

Today is the first day in weeks that the sun has come out for a few minutes here and there.  My fellow beekeeper, Peter, knocked on my door this morning and let me know that the bees were very active and wondered if I might like to have a look.  You do not have to do much convincing to have me drop everything and play with the bees so I suited up and headed out to have a look see.

We have two hives that are booming.  Three died in the winter.  That is about normal for us so I was sad for them but not surprised.  We hope to split the big hive this week in an attempt to keep them from swarming.  Peter had to meet with his daughter's teacher so I was out there alone poking through our supplies and cleaning up from all the rain damage.  I'd wait for him to get back before we opened the hives since he loves that part as much as I do but could care less about sorting and cleaning.  I am the king of organizing, nothing gives me more pleasure, so I was happily sorting the good from the bad frames, moldy ones in this pile, brittle gray comb in this pile for the swarm trap box, white clean comb for the honey supers, brand new frames with wax foundation in this pile.  After about an hour of cleaning out and scorching the boxes with the propane torch to kill mold and disease spores I had enough boxes for two swarm traps and three hives.  The rest were for honey supers, about 10 stacked up in a pile taller than my head.

apiary after I cleaned it up and got it ready for another spring

The neighborhood blue jay was also happily working on eating up all the dead bees I had shaken out of the frames from the hives that did not survive.  Windfall for him today.    He sits on the beehives or the fence and swoops in and eats bees all day long.  He also comes and taps on my kitchen window in the morning then sits in the plum tree and stares and squawks at me.  (see below)

I took one of the traps and put it up on the back deck facing out into the garden.  I'm not sure where to put the second one.  Up on the roof?  Any excuse to climb around on the house, right?  Now it's time for a lunch break and then, if the sun is still out when Peter gets home, we'll make a split and find a place for the second swarm trap. 

swarm trap on back deck...newly waterproofed so my laundry room no longer leaks.  yay.

discretely placed swarm trap right above the largest window.  You can hardly see it.