Comment by sitkack
5 hours ago
We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees!
They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003146
5 hours ago
We are learning so many wonderful things about Bees!
They can count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003146
Growing up on a farm taught me that animals are absolutely able to think and learn. Not in the same way as humans, but I'm fully convinced there are degrees of consciousness.
Watching new calves play in spring meadows is one of the most purely joyful things you can ever see. They have best friends and will avoid playing with other calves until their friend comes to play with them.
Thanks for this memory. I had similar experience watching spring lambs and swore off mutton/lamb/etc same day.
I love bees and ants, but I love bees the most. I would recommend people to study the behavior of bees and ants. Additionally, honey, propolis, etc. are super healthy, and we can thank bees for that.
Agreed! Bees are my favorite social insect (we share a love of hexagons, for one thing) and they seem to be especially intelligent.
Not that I want to curb your enthusiasm for bees, but…
I recently read that honey bees in particular get the most attention from humans lately, so they are kept in high numbers.
This has some adversarial effect on other pollinators, which hurts ecosystems more than it helps.
I‘d give it a chance. After all it can’t be any worse than Seinfeld for Bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Movie
Why would what you said curb my enthusiasm for bees though?
Can you provide me more specifics on this by the way?
> This has some adversarial effect on other pollinators, which hurts ecosystems more than it helps.
What are those adversarial effects, what other pollinators, and how does it hurt the ecosystem more than it helps?
I do not mind bees having kept in higher numbers, and beekeepers can do it anywhere without affecting the ecosystem, I believe.
9 replies →
I promise this isn’t a trap, it’s just my curiosity as a “flexitarian”. What (mostly) keeps me from eating animals is my mind wandering sometimes when making a protein choice about how they ended up there, wherever I am, not by choice.
Are you vegan?
Goats are just as tasty if you raised them, IMO. Maybe even tastier.
You can’t avoid the reality that’s your life depends on something else dying. Either plant insect or animal
How and why you draw the line on what is acceptable to kill is mostly arbitrary
I’d argue a mushroom or a bee are more “conscious” than most chickens
What is your definition of “conscious” here? Like it has thoughts and feelings?
I remember reading somewhere that bees have the highest cognitive abilities of all insects
Thinking of smart bugs, check out the portia (aka jumping) spider. They plan multi-step, out of sight detours to ambush prey, and demonstrate impulse control. They have specialized hunting techniques for different menu items, one such is mimicking specific prey items stuck on a web to lure various types of spiders out.
Insect wise, bees have to take the cake. Symbolic communication and counting, and now time. This all tracks for something that needs to share the location of food with the colony.
Nature sure is neat.
Consciousness is a spectrum.
Even if that were true, how could you possibly know it?
Observing animals' behavior (in the wild and through experiments like the one here) and studying how their brains work to see that they often have the same kind of mental features as us (including whichever you'd classify as consciousness) - just at varying degrees of sophistication.
Some would argue that "consciousness" is something non-physical that has no physical impact, and so is not physically detectable or responsible for any behavior, but I feel then it inherently cannot be whatever we mean by "consciousness" that we're directly aware of and talking about in the physical world.
... with insects on the low side, humans are mid, and dogs are top