grizzly
Drone Bee
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2008
- Messages
- 1,103
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Hampshire
- Hive Type
- Langstroth
- Number of Hives
- 6
Was reading a new book last night, and it mentioned that bees have been found to recognise a face for up to 2 days.
Some of you may already know it, but i just Googled it as i was curious and you can see below.
Honeybees may look pretty much all alike to us. But it seems we may not look all alike to them. A study has found that they can learn to recognize human faces in photos, and remember them for at least two days.
Image above: A honeybee inspects a photograph of a face in preparation for a landing. (Courtesy the Journal of Experimental Biology)
The findings toss new uncertainty into a long-studied question that some scientists considered largely settled, the researchers say: how humans themselves recognize faces.
The results also may help lead to better face-recognition software, developed through study of the insect brain, the scientists added.
Many researchers traditionally believed facial recognition required a large brain, and possibly a specialized area of that organ dedicated to processing face information. The bee finding casts doubt on that, said Adrian G. Dyer, the lead researcher in the study.
He recalls that when he made the discovery, it startled him so much that he called out to a colleague, telling her to come quickly because “no one’s going to believe it—and bring a camera!”
Dyer said that to his knowledge, the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species. But not all bees were up to the task: some flunked it, he said, although this seemed due more to a failure to grasp how the experiment worked than to poor facial recognition specifically.
In any cases, some humans also can’t recognize faces, Dyer noted; the condition is called prosopagnosia.
In the bee study, reported in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dyer and two colleagues presented honeybees with photos of human faces taken from a standard human psychology test. The photos had similar lighting, background colors and sizes and included only the face and neck to avoid having the insects make judgments based on the clothing. In some cases, the people in the pictures themselves looked similar.
The researchers, with Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, tried to train the bees to realize that a photo of one man had a drop of a sugary liquid next to it. Different photos came with a drop of bitter liquid instead.
A few bees apparently failed to realize that they should pay attention to the photos at all. But five bees learned to fly toward the photo horizontally in such a way that they could get a good look at it, Dyer reported. In fact, these bees tended to hover a few centimeters in front of the image for a while before deciding where to land.
Some of you may already know it, but i just Googled it as i was curious and you can see below.
Honeybees may look pretty much all alike to us. But it seems we may not look all alike to them. A study has found that they can learn to recognize human faces in photos, and remember them for at least two days.
Image above: A honeybee inspects a photograph of a face in preparation for a landing. (Courtesy the Journal of Experimental Biology)
The findings toss new uncertainty into a long-studied question that some scientists considered largely settled, the researchers say: how humans themselves recognize faces.
The results also may help lead to better face-recognition software, developed through study of the insect brain, the scientists added.
Many researchers traditionally believed facial recognition required a large brain, and possibly a specialized area of that organ dedicated to processing face information. The bee finding casts doubt on that, said Adrian G. Dyer, the lead researcher in the study.
He recalls that when he made the discovery, it startled him so much that he called out to a colleague, telling her to come quickly because “no one’s going to believe it—and bring a camera!”
Dyer said that to his knowledge, the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species. But not all bees were up to the task: some flunked it, he said, although this seemed due more to a failure to grasp how the experiment worked than to poor facial recognition specifically.
In any cases, some humans also can’t recognize faces, Dyer noted; the condition is called prosopagnosia.
In the bee study, reported in the Dec. 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dyer and two colleagues presented honeybees with photos of human faces taken from a standard human psychology test. The photos had similar lighting, background colors and sizes and included only the face and neck to avoid having the insects make judgments based on the clothing. In some cases, the people in the pictures themselves looked similar.
The researchers, with Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, tried to train the bees to realize that a photo of one man had a drop of a sugary liquid next to it. Different photos came with a drop of bitter liquid instead.
A few bees apparently failed to realize that they should pay attention to the photos at all. But five bees learned to fly toward the photo horizontally in such a way that they could get a good look at it, Dyer reported. In fact, these bees tended to hover a few centimeters in front of the image for a while before deciding where to land.
, they will always follow me, even if i have another beek with me, they will always follow me 
