Friday, December 02, 2005
Honeybees are smrt
Australians believe bees are so important that they built the bees their very own flight facility, curiously named the All-Weather Bee Flight Facility. The cows in India don’t even have their own flight facility. At that flight facility is where scientists from the Australian National University and Würzburg University in Germany have recently discovered something that surely has the potential to net them a Nobel prize; Honeybees have an amazing short term memory. They don’t seem to be smart enough though to realize that their so-called flight facility is merely a large climate-controlled greenhouse where scientists just use them to do research. In this case they had the bees flying through patterned tunnels after which they gave them a chance to pick a matching chamber. Their paycheck? Nothing if they didn’t pick the right chamber, but when they did–even Bill gates’ daughters would be envious–they got to taste some sugar water. If humans got sent spelunking through patterned tunnels for research, they could pick the wrong tunnel all they want, but they would still get payed a rhinoceros’ weight in gold. With such extraordinary wages I wonder if any of those scientists ever fear that the bees might revolt, kill them, and perform their own tests on wild marsupials. Or worse; they could pick the wrong chambers on purpose rendering the scientists’ valuable research results completely useless. I’m not saying the research was very useful to begin with, but someone obviously thought it was. Someone felt it more important to support the abuse of these bees–I’m surprised Greenpeace hasn’t organized a big campaign to stop this madness yet–, rather than to spend it on charity, research on Aids, or even better, a make over for Martha Stewart. What is it about this discovery that makes it so important?
Honestly, I think it has to do with the massive length of time that these bees can remember things. They can remember things for a whopping amount of five seconds, before it completely leaves their mind. This discovery wouldn’t be nearly as significant if they recalled things of only four seconds ago, or even if they remembered things of six seconds earlier. It has something to do with the number five. It’s the answer to the untimely question, “What is two plus three?” , it’s the number left out at the start of the song American Music by the Violent Femmes, it’s the name of one my friends’ awesome movies, it’s the number of workdays in a week, it’s the number of fingers on a healthy hand, and it’s not pi Now find out where Osama Bin Laden sleeps at night all we need to do is invent away to make honeybees fly fast enough to cross Afghanistan twice in less than five seconds, figure out a way for them to communicate with us, release them throughout Afghanistan, and figure out a way to lure them back in time to tell us where Osama Bin Laden is hanging out. Osama, you better watch out; honeybees are coming to scout!