It's great! Most of the book is great stuff that I was expecting: experiments and findings about bees. What I did not expect is the biographical bits about historical bee researchers. These are very short, so absolutely don't distract from the bee content. But they are also amazing! Never a boring figure. Everybody was a freed slave, fighting the nazis, ending up in an insane asylum, or something else equally gripping.

The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka | Goodreads The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka | Goodreads

Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee is a mind-blowing presentation of scientific evidence and insight showing beyond any reasonable doubt that bees have awareness, memories, basic emotions, intelligence, and personalities―and that what we are doing to them and their world has not just practical but moral implications.”―Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words and Becoming Wild The Mind of a Bee makes for fascinating reading. The book’s tight structure and numerous illustrations make it accessible . . . . [And I have] been thoroughly convinced by Chittka that bees are anything but little automatons."—Leon Vlieger, Inquisitive Biologist Dit opzienbarende experiment is maar een van de vele die Chittka beschrijft in Het bewustzijn van de bij, zijn boek op basis van dertig jaar onderzoek. Dat bijen en hommels een zonnekompas hebben en aardmagnetisme voelen wisten we al. Het zijn zaken die hen helpen om van meer dan twee kilometer ver feilloos hun weg terug naar huis te vinden. Maar dat ze weten welke bloem net bezocht is door een andere bij, waardoor ze geen nectar meer bevat, was toch een verrassing. Blijkbaar zijn bloemen elektrisch negatief geladen en bijen positief. Wanneer een bij die bloem bezoekt wordt ze iets positiever, wat de volgende bij meteen voelt.An incredibly rich and complex examination of the interior life of bees, well-suited to those with a deep and abiding interest in scientific experimentation and its subsequent nomenclatures. I am not one of them. While the subject is utterly fascinating, I found my mind wandering all too often as I struggled to maintain interest in its presentation. That said, the importance of understanding the subjectively conscious life of bees is not lost on me. I simply have little interest in the extreme amount of detail that Chittka presents. The book does not feel extraordinarily accessible to the scientific layman, and I believe it suffers as a result.

The Mind of a Bee Reviewed. - The Beelistener The Mind of a Bee Reviewed. - The Beelistener

I strongly recommend you read [Chittka’s] book and if you will excuse the pun ‘make your own mind up’. Science and nature writing at its finest and an essential read."—Roy Stewart, British Naturalists' Association The first chapter was phenomenal! So many obscure and fascinating apiary factoids! 10/10! I could re-read annually and still have new thoughts. This is the perfect book for developing metaphors. We have so much to learn from bees. Honeycomb is a marvel of engineering, and if you interfere with the preferred method of placing the hexes, bees adapt in clever and beautiful ways. Bees in zero gravity on the space station made their usual hexes but didn’t angle the boxes, as they do on earth, because gravity wouldn’t make the honey leak out. Bees are not a "hive mind" like you see in science fiction (no animal is, as far as we can tell), each bee is very much an individual and can have its own ideas about itself and the world.Bees can taste with their mouthparts, antenna, and with their feet. They can’t be fooled by artificial sweeteners like saccharine. They don’t like bitter or sour substances with the exception of some neonicontinoids used as pesticides. Great book. Detailed and informative, with a good deal of experimental and historical evidence to support the author’s points. A bit on the wonky side and loaded with information so one needed to pay attention and contemplate what was being presented. well shoot. first off let me say a huge thank u to all those who have died trying to figure out how a bee's brain worked. it was actually just two guys but maybe there were more that didnt get recorded. bless them and rip. The time that insects were seen as little machines, incapable of complex thought, emotions, and learning, is far behind us. We can wish for no better guide than Lars Chittka for an accessible introduction to the wonders of bee intelligence.”―Frans de Waal, author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka | Goodreads

Chittka dispels the myth that worker honey bees are cold blooded and explains why they like drinking warm nectar and how they can learn to associate the colour of flowers with nectar temperature and can predict nectar temperatures based on past experiences. Thanks to Lars Chittka’s captivating account of bees’ thinking and feeling, I now look with fresh eyes at these small animals. They plan ahead, feel pain, and express their very own personalities. The ingenious experimental evidence Chittka offers in support of these and many other points is as convincing as it is fascinating.”―Barbara J. King, author of Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild Most of us are aware of the hive mind-the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Bees don’t have eardrums, so they don’t hear like humans, but they do hear. A new human that has never gone to a heavy metal concert hears 20-20,000 Hz. Bees feel air movements with their antenna, sensing sound waves ranging from 20-500 Hz, and can feel hive vibrations with their feet. Like Rhianna said, “let the bass from the speakers run through ya sneakers.” (Or was that Bee-yoncé?)There is a quote from Darwin’s research where he noted that bees sometimes copy the behaviour of “Humble bees” (didn’t know that). I smiled when I read how Darwin spelled bumble bees, since the Swedish word is “Humlor”, much closer to the word Darwin used. And “hum” is probably chosen because of how they sound when they fly. He thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognise themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. He draws these conclusions from experiments in his lab with female worker bees. “Whenever a bee gets something right, she gets a sugar reward. That’s how we train them, for example, to recognise human faces.” In this experiment, bees shown several monochrome images of human faces learn that one is associated with a sugar reward. “Then, we give them a choice of different faces and no rewards, and ask: which do you choose now? And indeed, they can find the correct one out of an array of different faces.” From what scientists can tell, bees feel pain. They also have very rich and complex emotional lives, they can learn from each other as well as other animals, they can be taught to solve complex problems, and their minds are incredibly powerful thinking machines. Currently, we can't even design a robot that behaves as efficiently as a bee.

The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka - Audiobook | Scribd The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka - Audiobook | Scribd

Save THE DESTINATION - Decode The Mind: Ultimate Brain Mapping-To-Success Event to your collection. Share THE DESTINATION - Decode The Mind: Ultimate Brain Mapping-To-Success Event with your friends. Stel dat een blinde al tastend het onderscheid heeft leren maken tussen een kubus en een bol. Als hij opeens weer zou kunnen zien, zou hij die kubus en bol dan louter op het zicht herkennen? Dat vroeg de Ierse filosoof William Molyneux zich in 1688 af. Moeilijk te beantwoorden, dacht de Duitse, in Londen werkende zoöloog en etholoog Lars Chittka een paar jaar geleden, want hoe zet je zo’n experiment op? Met mensen leek het hem onmogelijk, maar misschien lukte het wel met bijen. In een pikdonkere omgeving liet hij een bij los op een paar bolletjes waar een druppel nectar in verborgen zat en op een paar kubussen zonder nectar. Eens het beestje het verschil tussen de twee kende, stak hij het licht aan en plaatste hij de bolletjes en kubussen in een afgesloten petrischaaltje zodat de bij alleen de vormen kon zien. Het diertje vloog meteen naar de bolletjes.Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee is a mind-blowing presentation of scientific evidence and insight showing beyond ... Intensely detailed, meticulously researched, and always illuminating, The Mind of a Bee is as enjoyable as it is intellectually stimulating. This book takes a fascinating deep dive into bees’ lives and minds, raising critical new questions for us as a species.”—Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings Second thing - scientists that study living creatures without at least a little appreciation and delight in the subject come across as SUCH sociopathic assholes. Looking at YOU, Jean-Henri Fabre. Let’s see YOU see in ultraviolet, you pompous jerk. Bet your vomit tastes horrible on pancakes, you insensitive twat. Can YOU fly? But when Chittka deliberately trained a “demonstrator bee” to carry out a task in a sub-optimal way, the “observer bee” would not simply ape the demonstrator and copy the action she had seen, but would spontaneously improve her technique to solve the task more efficiently “without any kind of trial and error”.