Honeybees like to use iPhones

Last summer, I tried to repeat some famous experiment with honeybees by Karl von Frisch, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on vision of bees.

I was partly successful. Using his method, I could clearly demonstrate for anyone that...

• bees can quickly learn how to come back to a new honey source, and
• they can distinguish various colors.

Here's the method.  First you have to attract bees to diluted honey.  It's rather difficult, because the bees in your garden buzz about with single-minded purpose, intent on finding the same nectar they have been gathering all morning or looking for nectar they were told about by others in the hive.

To attract the bees I used a small container that leaked honey water around the edges.  I could place the container (or a dummy that looked the same but without honey) on a colored plate or poster board.

Eventually I succeeded.  First they came by the tens, then by the hundreds.  I trained them first on a blue plate, putting out plates of other colors (but without honey) nearby.  I moved the relative positions of the plates around, so the bees wouldn't just learn the location of the honey, while ignoring the color.

This step was important, because bees are very good at finding their way to and from the hive.  When a bee leaves a new honey source and heads back to the hive, you can see her circling around in a widening upward spiral, as she remembers the location.  You want them to learn to find a honey source by color, not by location.

If I took away the honey source, I could put out posters or plates of a variety of colors, and almost all returning bees would go to the color they had been trained to.

Now here's the shocker.  I had been taking photos of bees coming to honey on a blue plate.  I accidentally left my iPhone with a photo on its screen in the garden, and suddenly I noticed bees were flying up to the photo on the phone as if it were a real plate with honey.  They even landed on top of the honey source visible on the screen.

Facebook for bees?  Who knows--they are incredibly social.  And, it's recently been shown that parrots like to interact with other parrots on social media.

These experiments can easily be repeated for students.  It's extremely unlikely anyone would get stung.  It requires good, warm weather, and several hours preparation to attract and train the bees (before the students come).  Students can learn more by reading books by von Frisch written for the layman.

The large bee is the one approaching the honey source shown on the iPhone.  See how in the second photo he zeros in on the honey source, ready to land on it. Click on photo to enlarge it.