About the awesomeness of the bee, and how we kill it

^{Abandoned deck The}

bee is something amazingly beautiful. The most skillful is a navigation system with a bunch of sensors at the entrance. If a bee is put into a new house, it will fly out after a while and begin to write the coordinates of the place. Fly away a few meters and begin the characteristic dance. After moving the hive, beekeepers place special branches on the bees so that they do not immediately fly out and get lost, but crawl out on them and have time to go nuts. And then they started recalibrating.

It quickly became clear in the USSR that bees do not collect plots near high-voltage power lines. Actually, they somehow disable navigation due to electromagnetic interference.

Worse, cellular network disturbances violate the food mobilization of bees. Presumably, it works like this: a bee flies out of the hive beyond the limit of the smell navigation and beyond the limit of the memorized area (more than 5 kilometers), and then cannot return using the polarization sensor and the cryptochrome signal.

It all started with an abandoned deck in Yekaterinburg, when instead of going to visit journalists about the store, we went to the forest. Here with this, that in the picture above.

What kind of deck?

A deck is a home for bees. Unlike a board, it is not made inside a tree, but from another tree and outside. It often hangs on conifers, because evil parasites do not crawl up to it. Conifers and parasites are less compatible than deciduous trees and parasites. On the side of the deck there is a long vertical slot for the bees and the lamellae of the honeycombs (the bees build them in this form).

Bortnik makes dozens of such decks and hangs them in the forest where there are many flowers. Then he attracts bees with interest so that they will settle in a new house. Sometimes a marten comes to the characteristic buzz and carefully lives like a vacuum cleaner inside. Less often, the bear finds the deck, but he doesn’t know how to use the word at all. As a rule, his face does not penetrate inside, so he drops the deck onto the ground. And, judging by the tracks, falls into prostration. Actually, he frantically tries to get honey, which is already-already, but not quite yet. Therefore, the deck is almost torn in half, and the clearing acquires traces of serious destruction. Another inexperienced bear can dig up a hornet's nest in the ground and walk away in bewilderment. But a razderbaniv deck is usually happy: serious energy costs are more than offset by honey.

One deck gives 30-40 kilograms of honey, and even before it is necessary to reach and bring everything to the village. The hive in the village gives about 100 kilograms. If the bees are supplemented with sugar, up to 300 kilograms, but little remains of honey. Therefore, honey from boards and decks is usually rarely farther than the village and the relatives of the villagers.

This deck hangs in the park "Deer Streams" in Yekaterinburg. And this park is characterized by the fact that there are no power lines and almost no cellular communication. And here we hear an interesting fact: in the village, cellular communication has already begun to interfere with beekeeping. And the decks work fine. If not to count this here, it was not very calculated by the colors in the district - too much of hellebore seems to be.

Well, a normal person would have been here and went home. And I, like the former signalman, had a strange question: why the hell bee is not friendly with frequencies of 900 and 1900 MHz? What in the entrance cascade of a bee aggravated such?

I’ll say right away that I am not a beekeeper, but I found a couple of beekeepers. The beekeepers I found are not signalers or engineers, so I continue to rely on research. And I can only err on the way. Correct me, if I'm somewhere, please.

Colony of bee colonies (CCD, colony collapse disorder)

Picture: you open a hive, and there are almost no worker bees left. The uterus and attendants sit without food supplies. There are no dead bees anywhere. Where workers - it is not clear. In 2005, this brought about $ 200 million in losses — families simply died, and farmers did not receive honey. In 2006, the phenomenon (already known) received the name - in fact, CCD. In six years, 10 millions of fucking (!) Hives were lost .

But do not rush to blame very very modern technology. The first single manifestation of CCD dates back to the year 1869. The modern mass wave began around 2004. And this is a straight wave-wave.

Began to investigate. There are no seasonal reasons for the family to leave the hive. On attacks with robbery from other bees, too, does not indicate anything. According to the results, they came to the conclusion that a whole set of factors could have such an effect: antibiotics, pesticides, immunodeficiencies and infection with a fungus, and a number of other versions. None of these factors act separately. Then they began to check the effect on the bees of the frequencies of 1900 MHz, and came to the conclusion that they did not care. Later studies are more interesting . When exposed to electromagnetic radiation from a normal phone at a frequency of 900 MHz, the bees are fully calibrated in 10 days.

By the end of 10 days, none of them can return to the hive. Here is the talking table from this study:



And here’s another:

“Experts from the University of Punjab were placed in bee families for 10 min phones that worked at a frequency of 900 MHz. As a result, the working individuals left their families, and the egg production rate of the irradiated queens decreased by 3.5 times compared with the controls - Rybochkin A.F. The impact of electromagnetic radiation and electric fields on living organisms / Innovations in beekeeping. - Rybnoye, 2009. "

More research .

In general, something in the bee from EMR breaks down. The next logical question is how is it, and why does a bee not return from memory?

Bee navigation

The bee sees quite well, especially in the ultraviolet. She needs it to search for flowers. It can be assumed that it is enough for her to approximately go to the place where the hive stands, to fly into it, using the usual visual reference points.

And the bee has an ancient Viking compass, which helps to determine the polarization of light. This means that thanks to her cleverly lamellar eyes, she can see the sun even when it is behind the clouds. More precisely, it sees the polarized parts of the sky and makes a forecast on them. It was checked - at certain overlaps with clouds, the bees are lost, because they cannot distinguish from the backside. A similar principle was used in the USSR for solving problems of aerial photography. dzavalishinin the fall, he was telling in one binge how the speed of movement of the film on the plane is arranged. There is a gap, which, by the principle of a scanner (just the opposite), draws on the tape of the film what is below. The task is to get to the speed of an airplane with an accuracy of about 85% in order to maintain sharpness. You have an optical mouse that solves this problem at home. At first they were made with sails on an unwinding device and a special air intake. Then the engineers came up with how to do it right with a single photoresistor. They put a grid under it and began to shoot a spectrum - if it is very properly cut off (which was also done on transistors), then you can get speed.

Here is one of the demonstrative experiments :

An ant is able to move more than 100 meters from the nest and return to it with an accuracy of up to 1 meter, i.e. with an error of less than 1% ... First thought - maybe it's pheromones or chemical signals. However, they are not used and in any case would be useless at very high (up to 45 ° C) temperatures in the desert. ... The ants were able to find their way back, seeing only a small part of the sky. To exclude the sun and all other landmarks, the experimenter followed the ant with a small camera, holding its hole (through which the sky was visible) exactly above the ant. Special filters were placed in the hole to select the direction, wavelength and angle of polarization of the sunlight perceived by the ant. Even without the sun, the distinctive details of the landscape and the smells, the ant, seeing only the sky, was heading straight for the nest.

Bee harder transistor unit. But it solves another more complicated task, and in order to use this compass mechanism, the bee somewhere needs to be corrected for the angle of the sun to the horizon. She does not teleport, but spends time flying to food, and then goes back - and the sun is from a different angle. That is, the bee needs to know the time to understand where the sun should be. We need some kind of clock generator. In the bee did not find this.

Now we go back to the national experience. Interestingly, the beekeeper kept the secrets of hacking bees from ancient times. For example, they know that if bees put a dish with sugar syrup near the hive and add vodka there, they will get drunk. Exactly to the degree when they go nuts so much that they crowd out to smash someone else’s hive and rob honey from it. So, an unscrupulous beekeeper can do that and get honey from all the neighboring hives. Accordingly, specialists in the protection of beehives are keeping flour at hand for the hackers' battle: you have to sprinkle on the attacking bees and go all over the village to see who has the white bees. Then their owner breaks down heavily to restore balance.

But this is not important to us. We are interested in other parts of the experience of these hackers.What, for example, if you move the hive, and in its old place put the receiving frame with the package, you can collect the flown insects into the package. If a hive with a weakened family is put in place of the good old hive, then the workers who have returned will replenish its population. And the coolest hack of a bee: if you move the hive to the side, and symmetrically put the second one to the same hive (so that the partition is at the entrance to the old one), the returned bees will share approximately in half.

On the other hand, multi-colored beehives in the apiary (where there are many hives in one place) help the bees to find their own.

Also from the experiments it became known that the bees memorize the area for about 5 kilometers around the hive. And still can go on landing on drives, that is, forgive, on a smell. They need it to make delicious honey.

Somewhere else in the bee, an accelerometer is installed, which, together with the brain, turns into an inertial compass. This became known from the experiment with the reloading of bees by small weights: they incorrectly counted on the return journey.

Now even more interesting. Bees can use visual flow processing to measure distance. The speed of movement of objects relative to the facets, they determine the distance. Then they communicate this information with the help of special dances to other bees.

“By placing the bees flying in search of food into narrow tunnels, where a higher visual flow was created, perceived by bees as a flight over a greater distance. Then, the bees participating in the experiment communicated this incorrect information to their comrades, who, having received the message, began to search for food at more distant distances. , Creation 17 (4): 46–48, 1995.

Here is an essay about bee navigation. Here's more in Russian with illustrations . Please note that all sources are dated by different years and operate on different reasons, so you only need to look at the empirical results.

Let's go back to the bees. They also "see" magnetic fields. It is quite possible that it is this super loudspeaker that is responsible for the azimuths or gives them some kind of timing pulses. Times :

An example of how a bee responds to a thundercloud approaching an apiary. Insects immediately stop collecting nectar and with a roar they return home so swiftly that some fly into someone else’s hives that are in the way of their flight. And no security guards are no longer valid. During thunderstorms, bees can freely enter any nest. This phenomenon can be explained only by the fact that when a thundercloud approaches the apiary around it, the electrostatic field becomes so much stronger than the electromagnetic field of the Earth that the bees lose their orientation. There is a semblance of a magnetic storm with strong flares on the Sun, when the arrows of the compass on ships, especially in the polar seas, cease to point strictly to the north and south, and the ship loses its orientation along the compass.
Eskov in the article “Low-frequency electric fields and the behavior of bees” gives examples of the interaction of a bee with electromagnetic fields of high-voltage power lines (LEP), electromagnetic fields of powerful power plants, an electrostatic field of a thundercloud, and the behavior of bees when the thunderstorm approaches. Many of his arguments confirm the validity of the above examples of the behavior of bees in the Earth’s magnetic field and the influence of electromagnetic and electrostatic fields on them.

Two, observations of a beekeeper from Tula .

Scientific rationale: cryptochrome and the fact that it is needed not only for ultraviolet sensors, but also for magnetic .

And the result :

"Animals, including insects, for navigation ... Finding your way back. ”

Moral: it looks like a little bee managed to get a very perfect analog computer with amazing calibration accuracy. It was born from the bug of the cryptochrome squirrel, which suddenly turned out to be a major feature. Considering that bees (unlike ants) need to move over long distances and solve an order of magnitude more complex tasks, not the efficiency of the mechanism, but its very survival depends on the accuracy of the mechanism. So we stayed out until very serious changes in the ecosystem, congratulations.

And you know what we answer? Microdrones ! Because without the bees, we will have nothing to eat ( proof), there will be almost no jeans and coffee, and at the same time the ladybugs will be very affected, that is, there will be less meat. Therefore, we really need effective pollinators. There are, of course, butterflies, birds and bats, but bees do this in profile and in large quantities.

In general, this is the story. For some, CCD will not be news, but I am relatively new on this planet, so I was struck by two things at once: the beauty of the bee and the scale of the disaster.