Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Flight of the Bumblebee

There is an interesting story on the BBC Website about how scientists are using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags to track the flight of Bumblebees.

Apparently Bumblebees have a relatively small brain - they have about 950,000 brain cells, humans have 100 billion - but they can achieve impressive feats of memory and the scientists at the Queen Mary, University of London.

The scientists are hoping the RFID tags will help them to find out how bees can find find the shortest routes between flowers, especially given their relatively small brains.

Do check out the link if you are interested.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

just read the link, how on earth do they get a tag that small lets hope it will stop the bees decline in the future, very interesting read. Jan cornwall

Anonymous said...

I wish I'd known about jobs like that when I was at school. Imagine studying things like that and getting paid for it...

Mary said...

My favorite bee. I watch them float from flower to flower all the time. The link is great - amazing they can recognize individual faces...

oldcrow61 said...

Facinating! Interesting that they recognize faces.

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