to bee or not to bee

Krish Uttamchandani
Written By Minimax

I have a very complicated relationship with insects. As much as I try to love them, they give me no reason to. The closer I try to get to them, the farther they push me away. It’s almost as if there’s no reciprocation of feelings here. Unfortunately I know, in my heart, that I cannot give up on this failed relationship. They will outlive me one way or another, I might as well appreciate them before they surpass our species in survival. Whew, that got too real.


Insects, especially bees, are known to buzz. In that regard, they are no different than humans. We love to buzz around. Buzzing, or being social, is more of a primal instinct. Yes, the cliche is true, man is a social animal. But of course, as a Handels student, you already knew that. There’s something about finding familiarity within each other that bonds us, that makes us long for more. We talk about things we agree on, hang around with people who hold the same opinions as us, and are more likely to find a sense of kinship within sycophants. But of course, as a Handels student, having studied management and marketing, you already knew that. Such instincts make humans like a refined network of hive minds. Why hive minds? Well, bees are actually not that far off in terms of social behavior, which is where the term comes from.


The term “hive mind” was first coined by sci-fi writer James H Schmitz in a short story called “Second Night of Summer”. A hive mind signifies a way of thinking, specifically, a group’s way of thinking, as if a single mind was driving it. Nevertheless, going back to our original point- bees are so much more similar to humans than we perceive them to be. We could stay here and draw satirical parallels between a society of humans and bees, and perhaps you even should do that in the future out of sheer curiosity. Drone bees, worker bees, nurse bees, queen bees, royal jelly, the phenomenon of swarming, bees being thrown out of the hive to preserve food, lazy bees lying in the hive all day, the parallels are truly endless. However, it would be far more interesting to observe the ways bees create buzz. Socialize, I mean. (But also partly because it’s far more interesting than observing how humans socialize, I’d rather not look at people asking for each other’s LinkedIn, smiling at each other pretending to be invested in the conversation, all for a request of reference in the future for the sake of selling themselves and calling it networking in the facade of sophistication.)


It seems great minds think alike, for a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign pursued the above train of thought, observing bees and their social networks develop over time. They took a Handels student and a KTH student and locked them in a room together. What ensued was a noisy night and screams of terror. Not quite, they just used statistics in biology, but you get the emotion behind it, right? They found that bees are very similar to humans in the context of them having individual differences. (Wow, my Handels and KTH example is literally applicable everywhere). 


“Originally, we wanted to use honey bees as a convenient social insect to help us find ways to measure and think about complex societies,” said Swanlund Chair of Physics Nigel Goldenfeld. “A few years ago, Gene, Tim, Vikyath and I collaborated on a large project that put “bar codes” on bees so that we could automatically monitor everywhere they went in the hive, every direction in which they pointed, and every interaction partner. In this way, we could build a social network in time, something known as a temporal network.”


In the aforementioned experiment, they found that bees performed something called trophallaxis- mouth to mouth liquid food transfer. While it was seen as a means of feeding, it was also found to be a means of social interaction. They analyzed the data set further and found irregular durations of the said interaction events, a similarity with humans. Much like someone from Handels talking to someone from Handels, rather than someone from KTH. 


“We developed a theory for this based on a very simple idea: if a bee is interacting with another bee, you can think of that as a sort of “virtual spring” between them,” said Goldenfeld. “The strength of the spring is a measure of how attracted they are to each other so if the spring is weak, then the bees will quickly break the spring and go away, perhaps to find another bee with whom to interact. If the spring is strong, they may stay interacting longer. We call this theoretical description a minimal model, because it can quantitatively capture the phenomenon of interest without requiring excessive and unnecessary microscopic realism. Non-physicists are often surprised to learn that detailed understanding and predictions can be made with a minimum amount of descriptive input.”


The above paragraph might have been a mouthful, so allow me to break it down for you. Bees and humans are eerily similar when it comes to dating too. If someone is interested in you, you will feel the connection and continue to make small talk of empty questions and half-hearted answers, for the potential of a future connection. An actual connection, mind you, stop thinking about LinkedIn all the time. If they’re not interested in you, you’d most likely feel it and move on to the next person, unless you can’t read this polite rejection and shall gladly stand there embarrassing yourself, pursuing a conversation with someone who couldn’t care less about your investment in crypto. 


Now that a similarity is established, let’s speak of some dissimilarities. Although both humans and bees come from East Africa, humans cannot live without coffee and chocolate while bees are the reason we have coffee and chocolate. Humans separate flowers from their guardians, while bees help flowers have satisfactory intercourse. Lastly, bees live their lives to fulfill their purpose since they have one, unlike humans. To spite bees for having a reason to live, humans came up with the simile “as busy as a bee”. I daresay irony. 


Sources-


Minimax https://sasse.se
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