New research by the University of Washington and the UA shows that background odors can interfere with pollinators’ ability to find flowers.
Car and truck exhaust fumes that foul the air for humans also cause problems for pollinators. (more…)
A research team led by UA anthropologist David Raichlen has found that the Hadza tribe’s movements while foraging can be described by a mathematical pattern called a Lévy walk – a pattern that also is found in the movements of many other animals.
A mathematical pattern of movement called a Lévy walk describes the foraging behavior of animals from sharks to honey bees, and now for the first time has been shown to describe human hunter-gatherer movement as well. The study, led by University of Arizona anthropologist David Raichlen, was published on December 23, 2013 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Lévy walk pattern appears to be ubiquitous in animals, similar to the golden ratio, phi, a mathematical ratio that has been found to describe proportions in plants and animals throughout nature. (more…)
A story about bees at a world famous art museum.
Bees are artists
Patrons at the Weisman Art Museum (WAM) on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus are in little danger of being stung by honeybees, despite their close proximity to 100,000 of them. Bees basically mind their own business, and they have much to attend to. (more…)
Scientists seeking to understand the origin of the human mind may want to look to honeybees — not ancestral apes — for at least some of the answers, according to a University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist.
CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker said there is abundant fossil and archaeological evidence for the evolution of the human mind, including its unique power to create a potentially infinite variety of thoughts expressed in the form of sentences, art and technologies. He attributes the evolving power of the mind to the formation of what he calls the “super-brain,” or collective mind, an event that took place in Africa no later than 75,000 years ago. (more…)
