Quantum Honeybees (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Quantum Honeybees (1997)

discovermagazine.com

40 pointsTomte10 comments

This article is almost 20 years old. It's pretty interesting on it's own, but a lot of honeybee research has happened in the meantime. I would be curious to see any follow-ups on the magnetic / quantum effects on honeybee learning, though.

Bees generally code direction using polarized light, and they measure distance using the optical flow of visual information. This data is not always highly accurate, so they compensate with smell.

Anyone who has kept bees knows that they are absolutely brilliant creatures, but can also be pretty dumb. They have evolved their highly-tuned behaviors over millions of years. If you try moving a hive a distance of only a few meters, they can have a lot of trouble finding it, showing how critical their optical map of the world is for them to find things.

Anyone interested in current honeybee research, I recommend looking into the work of Thomas Seeley. He's written a few very good books over the last 20 years that bring together modern behavioral research. http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/seeley.shtml

I remember reading this article when it came out and found it fascinating but didn't have the knowledge to refute its more amazing claims, I wonder if anyone around here might be able to chime in?

Being able to observe a quantum state without disrupting it is literally, provably impossible (look up the no-cloning theorem).

Mathematics is abstraction. If this particular manifold shows up in both quarks and bee dances, that probably just means it's a pretty simple manifold. The logic here seems like the equivalent of: planets move in circles, wheels are circular, therefore wheels must be connected to planets.

Agreed. Discovering a simple mathematical model which matches the bee dance is really neat- it explains how an apparently complex phenomenon can be captured in a relatively simple piece of neural circuitry. The rest seems to be wild speculation.

Does anyone have the journal article she wrote about this? I can't find it online and it doesn't seem to even be listed on her website. I ask since my mom had this on NPR and loved the story (she had since kept bees) and now almost twenty years later, I study differential geometry. It'd be great to be able to explain the math to my mom, but this article doesn't give much to go on.

There's a thread about it on Quora (here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-current-state-of-research-... ) which gives this citation:

Shipman, B. A., 1996, Investigating bee behavior from the standpoint of fundamental physical principles, Am Bee J, 136, 5:339-40

Sadly, neither I nor my institution subscribe to the American Bee Journal. Her website also lists a second paper:

B.A. Shipman. The full Kostant -Toda lattice: Geometry of its singularities and its connection to honeybees and new developments in physics. Proceedings of the Workshop on the Iso Level Sets of Integrable Systems 2007. Keio University, MATH COE, Integrative Mathematical Sciences, JAPAN. 2007

but I couldn't find that anywhere either (not on PubMed, Google Scholar, MathSciNet...)

Try emailing her and asking for a copy of the paper. That's worked well for me in the past.

Done, we'll see if it goes anywhere.

That second one looks more promising, at least it gives the name of something to research (Kostant-Toda lattice)!

Very cool. Thanks for posting this.

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