When I was a boy my mother would buy enough cheap cards with clumsy drawings of butterflies and bunnies and honeybees for me to give one to every kid in my class, about 20 or so.
The Greeks and Romans were famous beekeepers who harvested respectable yields of honey from homemade hives, yet these ancients got almost every fact about bees wrong.
"All our bees were individuallynumbered with tags on the back of the thorax, so that we could keep track ofeach individual that left and entered the nest, " said the researcher.
Honeybees are frequently used as a neurobiological model for learning—they can be trained, using positive or negative reinforcement, to retain information.
Each scout inspects the site she navigated to and if she agrees that is a desirable dwelling place, she too performs a waggle dance when she returns to the swarm.