Bees Display Recognition of Human Faces

Although The Bee Movie did include some personal moments between humans and bees, nobody ever thought it was a reality. However, scientists have discovered that bees can recognize human features during repeated interactions. A bee's brain is teeny, about the size of a chia seed, so the fact that they are showing they can identify human features is incredible!

Beekeepers Get to Know Their Bees

Anytime a person spends time doing something, it becomes more familiar. Beekeepers who have been around for a while have become experts and often have intuitive approaches to things. So, when a beekeeper shares their personal story or explains their bees as having a personality, that may not be so farfetched. The more time beekeepers spend with their bees, the more they have intuition about hive health and hive behaviors that need to be more closely monitored, like mite activity. Beekeepers are caretakers of their bees, and this rewarding and demanding hobby is raising awareness of their role in our ecosystems.

Beekeepers and humane live bee removal companies like D-Tek are dedicated to preserving and caring for critical pollinators. Offering full-service humane live bee removal, no company is more skilled in ensuring the safety of people and the successful relocation of bees to a new apiary.

The Research That Supports Bee Recognition

The scientific research used to determine this ability in bees was done by repeatedly exposing bees to the same human faces related to a sweet sugar water reward. Over time, and as these human faces were shown repeatedly, the bees continued to be drawn to the same images without the reward. The ability to identify human features helps these social creatures recognize one another, but it also allows them to identify certain flowers that produce more pollen. Their little brains are quite capable of doing big things, and knowing where to go to get what your hive needs and who you are safe around are species-preserving skills!

Bee Patterns Help Criminologists

The criminal detectives used geographic profiling to study repeat offenders' behaviors and activities. It is a statistical-based technique that has helped solve and prevent countless crimes. In crimes like burglaries and homicides, using geographical profiling, law enforcement makes educated guesses about where they believe the suspect frequents, like their home. It is known that repeat criminals typically perform crimes away from their homes, so they cannot be detected easily. However, data shows repeat criminals also like to keep a safe distance but not be too far from their homes for convenience. An incredible discovery in bee foraging patterns has been that they follow the same pattern as geographical profiling. Studying bee foraging patterns provides additional insight that may improve the geographic profiling technique in solving crimes and finding criminals.

Bee foraging follows a similar pattern to repeat offenders in that they do things to avoid detection by predators. Data shows that bees create a distraction zone by leaving the pollen sources closest to their nest untouched, instead opting for forage sites further from the hive. The research team who observed bee’s flower visits used geographic profiling to locate their hives, and foraging patterns were found to be predictable as they successfully narrowed down the hive's location based on their behavior patterns. The insights from this research have been applied to refine the geographic profiling of repeat criminals.