To me, it seem ridiculous to call this "the first clear example of tool use in honeybees". I actually think there must be some big misunderstanding somewhere.
The argument is that by taking animal dung and coating the entrance they are "taking something and manipulating it to shape their environment", which they think qualifies as tool use.
But we've already known for ages that bees gather sap from trees and coat the inside of their hives with it (propolis), to seal gaps and prevent bacterial growth. I cannot think of any reasonable definition of tool use that would include dung coating but exclude sap coating.
Ctrl+f of "sap" and "propolis" in the original paper gave 0 results.
Edit: Upon further reading, they seem to define a tool as a "a non-plant solid", which seems specifically tailored to make dung the first tool. The fact that they fail to mention propolis even once in the paper to highlight what they think is the important difference does not impart confidence.
>It is also the first clear-cut example of honey bees using a tool in nature (nests and the materials used to construct them are not generally considered tools [82, 83], although some authors disagree [81, 89, 91]).
... so I assume the parenthetical is intended to cover the behavior you describe, ie building a nest would not be complete without sealing it so the sap usage doesn't count.
I think there's a lot of counterargument to this, but I'll stick to the best one: propolis is used as more than just a a sealant for the hive.
"However, if a small lizard or mouse, for example, finds its way into the hive and dies there, bees may be unable to carry it out through the hive entrance. In that case, they would attempt instead to seal the carcass in propolis, essentially mummifying it and making it odorless and harmless."
It's good to make titles less clickbaity. I don't quite understand the rationale for editing here though, because this is a claim seriously made by the underlying journal article in PLOS One.
Edited to add: it seems an exaggerated claim to me too, but it's not just in the headline
Good question. From our perspective the issue is whether the discussion here gets snagged on something controversial (sensational, etc.) that is less interesting than the main topic. If there's any such snag in the title, the thread will tend to fill up with shallow comments that are reacting just to that. We've learned that when such title objections start appearing, it's best to sand away the snag.
A little off topic, but something I've been pondering a lot lately is the relationship between eusociality (the colony structure you find in bees, ants, terminates, and 2 known mammal species) and intelligence. We can clearly see a difference between an ant or an ant colony and a human being, so the eusocial behavior cannot really be defined as intelligent. And in insects, the behavior is biological, not learned. And the interesting behavior is exhibited by the entire colony, not the individuals themselves, yet the idea that the colony has a mind is really not supported by our understanding of what a mind is. Yet outward traits of eusocial colonies and intelligent creatures are eerily similar in many ways. What gives?
Your body and brain are a collection of cells. None of those cells are what we would call intelligent on their own. Intelligence is an emergent property of a system of cells. Ant and bee colonies act as superorganisms (since they all depend on their queen for reproduction) and therefore the apparent intelligence emerges at that social level.
I understand what you're saying but that's not what in getting at. It is a little hard to articulate exactly what I'm curious about.
So in the insect species', the eusocial behavior is genetic. Worker ants are more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their daughters, the enforcement mechanisms in their systems are done by chemical communication, the pheromones are coded by DNA and can even differ slightly in different colonies. It is very very complex. You get behaviors in colonies that are very interesting, such as farming fungus in leafcutter ants (different species farm different species of fungus and use different plant material, and in many cases the fungus species only exist within the ant colonies). It is like the genetics of the colony itself is some sort of intelligent mechanism.
This cannot really be called "intelligence". But we intuitively see a similarity with intelligence when we look at it that we cannot quite nail down.
A brain of another animal does intelligent things, but with human beings we do something more that we consider the defining feature of our intelligence: we create things, synthesize things, go into space, all sorts of things. This behavior cannot be definitively chocked up to increased complexity of neurons.
What is the commonality with all this stuff? Is there some connection between the mechanics of amino acids and intelligence? What fundamentally about the universe makes it so that intelligence occurs inside it? It's all really interesting stuff.
It is interesting stuff, but humans are only more intelligent by degrees. All animals and organisms must exert some sort of adaptability to their environment or they are DOA. Our brains are certainly fantastic developments, but we also see this sort of emergent intelligence in AI, so it doesn't necessarily depend on amino acids. There, we see electronic neural nets achieving much of the same behavior.
To me, intelligence is a system. It can be a network of neurons embodied in an individual, a colony of ants, or a group of programmers working on a startup. The system itself has inputs and outputs and needs to be viewed at that level. We can view ant colonies as a coherent system. We can view individual organisms as a coherent system.
The main difference between ants and humans is that each node in a human social system is more powerful and the bandwidth of information shared between each node is much richer.
A lot of people point out that man can send a rocket to the moon, but really, only a civilization can do that. A tribe couldn't do it in a million years. They would lack the industry and the science and the labor and resources and technology to pull it off. Those systems can be viewed as having a sort of emergent, even if ephemeral, intelligence that requires massive amounts of cooperation and coordination to pull off.
Only very few humans actually invent things. A few humans went to space, but it took a huge amount of people working together over a long time to make that possible.
We have language, as well as writing. And opposable thumbs.
Language allows us to teach each other things, writing multiplies that immensely and keeps knowledge over time. (And now audio, video recordings... But that's extremely recent)
And we have hands that are very useful for using tools.
I don't think we're necessarily that much more intelligent than other animals.
That might have a little to do with it, but it can't be the entire explanation. Human beings can send a man to the moon in a tin can. This has got to have something to do with intelligence. Ant colonies cannot do that. This comparison is now reminding me of Starship Troopers...
Where's the threshold? For thousands of years humans just hunted and gathered. They used primitive tools. I would argue that ants had more sophisticated behavior at that time.
The author goes miles deep on the subject of swarming and how a few thousand bees decide -all together- to inhabit a new home. Very meaty, with clear presentation of years of research.
"yet the idea that the colony has a mind is really not supported by our understanding of what a mind is."
so perhaps the problem is the current/popular understanding of what a mind is?
which tends to be linked to a central nervous system, which rules out octopuses (a class of animals which display clear and compelling examples of intelligent behavior)
or to be more general, which we tend to link to a nervous system, which rules out both eusocial colonies (as you point out) and plants (which show clear and compelling examples of changing responses to certain stimuli which if displayed by dogs would be called learning/intelligent behavior).
Related tangent: Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" (and sequel "Children of Ruin") is first-rate scifi that explores these kinds of questions, featuring artificially-accelerated evolution resulting in hyperintelligent insect and arachnid societies. Highly recommended.
I'm curious about the process (smearing dung on the hive entrance) leading to the result (giant hornets don't enter). There has to be some creative thinking there. How else could the connection been made?
I think the evolutionary trait explanation is “the ones who do this survive and the ones who don’t die off”, which doesn’t rule out creative thinking but doesn’t require it either.
a first? not so sure about that. What is propolis if not a tool? The little bugs dig out tree sap, mix it with saliva, and plug up holes in their homes to keep out cold and bugs and we have known about it forever. It's in our hippy shampoo and cosmetics!
The argument is that by taking animal dung and coating the entrance they are "taking something and manipulating it to shape their environment", which they think qualifies as tool use.
But we've already known for ages that bees gather sap from trees and coat the inside of their hives with it (propolis), to seal gaps and prevent bacterial growth. I cannot think of any reasonable definition of tool use that would include dung coating but exclude sap coating.
Ctrl+f of "sap" and "propolis" in the original paper gave 0 results.
Edit: Upon further reading, they seem to define a tool as a "a non-plant solid", which seems specifically tailored to make dung the first tool. The fact that they fail to mention propolis even once in the paper to highlight what they think is the important difference does not impart confidence.