Landing on Autopilot
By Crystal Svoboda
Have you ever turned out of your driveway, taken the left turn to work and gotten as far as the northbound freeway before realizing you were actually headed south to a friend’s house?
Would you believe me if I said this seemingly involuntary action is not exclusive to humans? Moving on “autopilot mode” also happens to bees! How do I know? I’ve witnessed it first hand with my hive.
I first learned of cognitive ecology as it was described in Shaw’s The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory book. Here the author depicts Kathryn Hunt’s work as she is surrounded by a hundreds of bumblebees. Expanding further, Hunt’s work led to exploring how false memories can be created in bumblebees. Bumblebees are thought to have a similar memory system to humans. But could the bees be tricked into making decisions that would prove to be a disadvantage? A flower-nectar test was created. The results concluded that a false memory was created with the bees. The term “muddled memory” was used to describe the matching of flower and nectar in the bees. Find more on Hunt’s work here.
Why am I connected to this story? It resonates with me because I too work with bees. Honeybees.
This is my second year of being a backyard apiarist. An apiarist is a fancy way of saying beekeeper, or, in other words, someone who works with bees for fun. I was warned before I installed my first hive that they were addictive. Not only do people tend to expand to have multiple hives, but many also are drawn to watch their hives for hours. I often provide laughs for my partner (and certainly my neighbors) when I sit next to my hives with a lawn chair. They truly are a marvel to watch. It is on that very lawn chair that I witnessed some pretty remarkable bee action. I’ve seen the bees defend their hive, bring in beautifully colored pollen, clean out the hive, and even carry out their deceased. I’ve watched as they tirelessly serve their queen, turn pollen into honey, and safeguard the brood.
It was in this same spot where I noticed something peculiar happening that related to Hunt’s work with bumblebees, memory, and most specifically automatic processing. Automatic processing is defined as “unconscious practices that happen quickly, do not require attention, and cannot be avoided” (Dyer, 2012). In the spring, after de-winterizing my hive, I slipped the entrance from the top hole to the baseboard with an entrance reducer. An interesting thing happened. The majority of bees continued to fly to the top of the hive where the winter hole had previously been. As seen in the image to the right, the bees are attempting to access the hive through the top hole that no longer exists. How long would it take for the bees to remember the entrance was now at the bottom? How long would it take for the old patterns to be replaced with a new memory? Or rather, turning off automatic processing. My assumption was a few hours, possibly a day or two.
Bees are marvelous creatures and have long been studied for numerous reasons including their ability to adapt. Why then was this taking so long to figure out? For days, weeks even, I witnessed a cluster of bees on the top cover where the winter entrance used to be. It often took bees multiple runs at the hive’s top board prior to falling down to the bottom where the new entrance was located.
The bees did figure it out. Now the bottom entrance door is in full use. Just like humans, after practice and repetition a new routine was created. Everyone has times in their lives when they feel like they keep banging their heads at the same entrance. Bees continue to provide me with inspiration. I hope you are able to apply the bee’s resiliency and ability to adapt into your life too.
Resources
Blackiston, H. (2017). Beekeeping for dummies.
Dyer, AG. (2012). The mysterious cognitive abilities of bees: why models of visual processing need to consider experience and individual differences in animal performance. J Exp Biol 215: 387–395.
Hunt, K. & Chittka, L. Merging of long-term memories in an insect. Current Biology, 25 (2015), p 741-745.
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory, Random House Books, London.