Bees

Robyn Williams and Belinda Smith explore biological cooperation and symbiosis, how bees protect their colonies against disease, and the pressures that climate change places on African lions. The programme also examines evolutionary competition between reptiles and mammals and the scientific accuracy of dinosaur displays. This edition brings together five science reports connecting interactions among organisms, environmental change and the communication of biological research.

Julie Sørlie Paus-Knudsen discusses learning and intelligence in bees and bumblebees alongside their ecological roles. Conversation in Norwegian.

Our world is full of living creatures that must share information to survive and reproduce. As humans, we easily forget how hard it is to communicate within natural environments. So how do organisms solve this challenge, using only natural resources? Ideas from computer science, physics and mathematics, such as energetic cost, compression, and detectability, define universal criteria that almost all communication systems must meet. We use insect swarms as a model system for identifying how organisms harness the dynamics of communication signals, perform spatiotemporal integration of these sign

…In the spring, thousands of worker bees and a queen fly from their hive in search of a new home. They self-assemble into a swarm that hangs from a tree branch for several days. We reconstruct the non-isotropic arrangement of worker bees inside swarms made up of 3000 - 8000 bees using x-ray computed tomography. Some bees are stationary and hang from the attachment board or link their bodies into hanging chains to support the swarm structure. The remaining bees use the chains as path