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To be or not to bee

Ever wonder about bumblebees and memory? Me neither… but let’s face it, whatever bee memory I might be able to remember, would likely be about getting stung, and not whether they were actually bumblebees. Of course, I’m not an entomologist, so I don’t even pretend to understand the vagaries and vicissitudes of the arthropod phylum. I mean come on, eh?

Still, anytime an essay has the courage to claim that bumblebees can help us understand the evolution of human memories, my neural circuits (well, the intact ones still claiming to work) fire up like a stoked boiler. The one I stumbled upon was part of the author’s PhD thesis, I think. It was terribly clever, of course, but my mind did not really understand much more than its title. However that may relate more to my proclivity for ordinal  rather than absolute preferences: whatever gives me the most reward, versus choosing what kind of reward… or is it the other way around…? I get that kind of thing mixed up nowadays.

Anyway wouldn’t you know it, for the article a group of lab bumblebees were trained on two different combinations of flower colours -one of each group had sugar, the other didn’t. Then, when the flower combos were switched and neither contained sugar the experimenters somehow determined that the bees had forgotten which ones they had previously preferred. Well, of course they did: the idiots in the white coats had neglected to put sugar in the usual colour… they were ordinal bees, for goodness sakes… or maybe they were the other kind… Anyway, maybe both sides were confused.

The conclusion? Well, to succeed in their nectar-world, the experimenters realized that bumblebees only need to remember which flower was sweeter, not which flower in a bouquet was sweet [i]. Uhmm, or have I mixed that up again?

Then, perhaps to make up for the confusion, a comparison with starlings (yes, starlings) was proffered. Starlings, like humans, it seems, use a combination of memories to solve problems. Not only absolutes (like which flower tastes the best) but also comparative memories (such as whether it was better or worse than another option). Well, starlings maybe, but humans too? I mean if I was taught that in kindergarten, I think I’d forget the correct memory to use by the time I’d hit Grade 1 -okay, maybe Grade 2… Grade 3 tops, at any rate!

But, starlings, unlike most primary schoolers, eat a varied diet with many types of foods including fruits, worms and seeds. Starlings remember things and use both absolute (how long it took to obtain a worm) and comparative insights (whether the waiting time was shorter or longer) when deciding between new combinations of food options[ii]. So, putting starlings aside for a moment, bumblebees content themselves with only one type of memory: only with where to find nectar, whereas Kindergarteners vacillate between sugar, worms, and nibbling on crayons and stuff I think… Perhaps I’m missing the point here…

Anyway, I think I should get back to meat of the article (with apologies to any vegans for that swear word); I’ll try to summarize the salient points. First of all, it’s difficult to earn a PhD without a well-designed question which needs answering; a PhD thesis in Animal Psychology should cover something that either breaks new ground, or elucidates an as-yet unproven hypothesis. I certainly couldn’t do it: I know next to nothing about starlings, and even less about something the size of a bumblebee that manages to visit flowers on those stubby little wings.

Perhaps another mystery about them -okay about all insects- is how they know where to go when they leave home, and how do they figure out what to do when they actually get there -wherever ‘there’ is. And why pick flowers, for goodness sake? Why not pick unwiped picnic tables, or garbage cans with loose lids? If the average home-schooled bumblebee has a brain the size and weight of a sesame seed (and only about a million neurons to spend)[iii] you’d think that by the time they even glimpsed the world outside of their nest, they would already have squandered most of their resources. Like, where are they gonna store stuff, eh?

If you were planning to write a PhD on them, however, it would help to know that research shows tiny brained invertebrates and large brained animals aren’t that different in their brain structure (we all stand on the shoulders of giants). They just file different things in smaller boxes in there I think. I, for example, don’t know much about flowers, although personally, I love the smell of lilacs and roses; still, I’m not sure I could find their nectar without a map.

At any rate, knowing all this background, the only thing you’d have to do to defend your PhD thesis, would be to devise a clever experiment with enough variables in it that the internal and external examiners would have to pay really close attention. Clearly, someone like me would never be asked to be an external examiner, and even if I were able to draw the variables and variations (in colour) on a piece of paper they let me bring into the room, I would not be up to the task.

I would have granted her the doctorate, of course -it was a cleverly conceived experimental design- and I suspect she would make a wonderful professor.

I think I would advise her to start her career with an age-limited class at first, however. There would likely be a lot of questions from her students, especially the older ones with memory problems. And I, for one, find that I now have trouble lifting my arm high enough to wave over other heads. I’ve aged a lot from when I last tried it, and even then I used to sit in the front row, so I could see the blackboard. It just wasn’t done in those days.

But, now that I’ve read this article, I realize I can understand and sympathize with the bumblebee’s strategy given my similarly limited cerebral equipment: I find I also try to specialize, and consolidate my daily culinary choices. I’m a restaurant kind of guy. I mean, I have my favourites, and I know what they usually offer… I think maybe I’d make a pretty decent bumblebee. And for that matter, I also suspect I know how the author got the great idea for her experiment…

[i] https://theconversation.com/how-bumblebees-can-help-us-understand-the-evolution-of-human-memories-192193

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

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