Children studied the choice patterns of bees as they collect nectar. Their research was published in a scientific journal
Noam Levithan and Yonat Ashhar Galileo
"There was" are a pair of words that often appear at the beginning of children's stories and not of scientific articles. Despite this, an article published in the journal BiologyLetters of the British Royal Society, we opened with these very words. The research described in the article was done by a group of 25 researchers who examined the vision and learning ability of ground bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). The members of the group are students aged 8 to 10 from Blackawton Primary School in the county of Devon in the south-west of England.
The students planned the research themselves, carried it out and finally wrote (or more accurately dictated) the article, under the guidance of neuroscientist Beau Lotto, from University College London, and the school's principal, David Strudwick. The research is part of a science education program called "I, a scientist" initiated by Lotto and Stradwick, and aims to teach children "how to do science" and allow them to experiment with it. In contrast to the normal scientific education in schools and in the first degree at the university, which do not include doing science, but performing structured experiments according to recipes whose results are known in advance, the education program of Lotto and Stradwick introduced children to science as a type of game in which asking questions and planning games with rules that may reveal the answers for questions.
To plan the science experiment, Lotto and Stradwick encouraged the children to ask questions about bees and how they see the world.
Some of the questions were, as expected, childish ("Can you teach bees to play soccer?"), but the children also raised many more complex questions such as "How much effort will a bee put in to reach the nectar?" or "Do bees prefer hot nectar or cold nectar?", questions some of which have been studied in the past. Finally, of all the questions the children raised, they chose to focus on the question: Can bees learn to use location information in a color space to learn where the nectar is located? An important question, as the children explain, since in nature "there can be flowers that are not good for bees, or ones from which they have already drunk the nectar" and therefore it is important that they learn to stay away from them "which is like a puzzle". That is, the children wanted to know how the bees know which flower to choose from among the flowers in the field.
The experiment itself took place in a bee "arena" located in the Norman churchyard in Blackawton. The arena was a plexiglass cube (acrylic glass) connected to a beehive. Inside the cube are four panels, with each panel including 16 colored light sources arranged as a square, each side of which consists of four light sources. The diameter of each illuminated area was 8 cm, so the length of the sides of the square is about 32 cm each. In the center of each of the lighted areas is a feeding tube containing tasty sugar water, repulsive salt water, or nothing at all.
After the bees learned to eat from the plates, the children began an experiment and tested if the bees could decipher the rules that determine where the sugar water is. They illuminated the perimeter of the squares, in two of the panels, with yellow light and the four lights in the center of the squares with blue light, so that a pattern resembling a flower was created. Lotto referred to the shape as such, since there is no nectar in the circumference ("petals") and there is in the center. The outside of the flower is painted in one color and the center in another color. The squares in the two remaining panels were illuminated in the opposite way - the outer part in blue and the inner part in yellow. In all cases only the four lights in the center provided sugar water to the bees and the rest of the lights provided salt water. The children changed the position of the boards every 40-10 minutes so that the bees would not learn the location of the lights ("flowers") with nectar relative to the cube or according to their color, but would have to learn that the sugar water is always in the four central flowers in each board.
To test the bees, the children repeated the experiment but this time without any sugar water or salt water, so the bees could only rely on what they had learned. The children counted how many times and where each bee flew and wrote the result in the table. The results showed that in 90.6% of the cases, the bees solved the riddle that the children set for them and chose the correct flowers, that is, they looked for sugar water in the center of each square. Although some bees preferred the blue flowers, when these were in the center, more than the yellow flowers, and vice versa.
Surprisingly, the children discovered that each bee learned to solve their puzzle in a different way. When the central lights were replaced with green lights, some of the bees continued to fly to the central flowers, while others showed a preference for the color they already knew and flew to the yellow or blue light - each bee according to her personal preference. In addition, when the children completely "destroyed" the color pattern so that all the lights in each panel were illuminated in one color (except for the corner lights), the bees did not show any preference for the central or side flowers, although some bees still preferred to visit their favorite color.
In other words, the bees solved the children's riddle not by using the simple rule "fly to the central flowers" or "fly to the least common color", but by combining the location of the flowers in space and the pattern of colors surrounding them. Or as the school students wrote: "Bumble bees can use a combination of color and location in space to decide in a flower which color to search for food. And we discovered that science is cool and fun because you can do things that no one has done before."
But although the students of Blackawton got to experience the joy of scientific discovery (including the fear that the experiment would not succeed "and it would be a disaster", and the joy that the bees learned and that they did an experiment "is important, because, as far as we know, no one in history, including adults, had done such an experiment before ”), it was not easy to publish the research. In the beginning, no party agreed to finance the research because, according to them, it is not worth the investment and there is no chance that children will be able to do such a thing. On top of that, it took Lotto almost two years to find a journal that would agree to publish the research. magazines such as Science, Nature, Current Biology and-PLOS They agreed that there are no problems with the research and its results, but refused to publish it since it does not include a reference (because it was written by children who are unable to read scientific literature). Finally, after Lotto was able to obtain a positive peer review of the paper, Christopher Frith, the editor of BiologyLetters, to publish the article on the condition that the publication is accompanied by an explanatory article that explains the scientific background, including references, and the place of the research in the context of studies that have already been published in the past.
And so, for the first time, an article was published in a scientific journal about a study that children planned and carried out, and which they dictated in a local pub (George's Inn), written in "children's language" and including sound effects (such as, "da, da, dahah") and with This adds to the existing scientific knowledge and shows that with the right education and the right attitude everyone is capable of understanding and "doing science".
A TED talk by Lotto and one of the girls from Blackawton about science for everyone and research (here or On the TED website with Hebrew subtitles)
for further reading
The original article (free access):
Blackawton, PS et al. Blackawton bees. Biol. Lett. 7, 168-172 (2011). doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.1056
The interpretation of the article:
Maloney, LT & de Ibarra, NH Blackawton bees: commentary on Blackawton, PS et al. Biol. Lett. 7, 166-167 (2011). doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.1057
A video clip accompanies the article and a video about a project "I, a scientist."
Shortcuts: Crossing gazes, even when it comes to monsters – Another study designed by a child.
The original article appears in the Galileo magazine issue 150, February 2011
