It’s certainly a slow news day today. Mittful of Dollars and plucky sidekick Lyin’ Ryan continue to slip in the polls and offend more and more people, such as conservative pundits, which is a pretty small constituency but one you would have thought he’d have in
The robobees are coming
his pocket. But it’s a development I’m happy to see and I’ll leave it to other bloggers to contemplate why Romney’s campaign is imploding so badly. I just think it’s because he’s a putz.
So, I’ll write about this.
While the general thrust of the article was interesting enough (that bees could learn through trial and error, that they have pretty intense memories about where the good flowers are, and, bottom line, that for creatures so tiny that they can’t really have anything like what we would think of as a brain, they are pretty gosh darned smart), it’s the methodology of the study that I find fascinating.
They tagged the bees. Now, I love Animal Planet and I’m fascinated by shows where they tag an animal like a turtle, or a dolphin, or a lioness, and they keep track of them and they’re sitting back at the lab and plotting their progress with their maps, and computers, and GPS. But these are bees. Teeny-tiny little bees.
And the tags are not your ordinary ankle bracelet or computer chip stapled to some poor animal’s ear. No, these are state of the art micro-spy systems, equipped with motion-sensor cameras and other Mars Rover type stuff like that.
If we can do that, we should be able to save the little honey makers
from extinction.
www.gurukalehuru.com 