Scientists already know that bees can do simple addition and subtraction, but a team in Australia came up with a new experiment to test a bee’s ability to follow mathematical sequences.
They put a jar of concentrated sugar syrup 100 meters from a hive, and then each day they increased the distance by 25%. And it turned out the bees very quickly learned the sequence, and after just 2 weeks, when the team went to the new location to position the jar, the bees were already there waiting. Somehow they were calculating the sequence 100, 125, 156, 195 …. where each number is 1.25 times the previous number.
Apparently, one day when they tried to increase the distance by a further 25%, they realised the location of the sugar would have ended up being in the middle of a lake. So they put the jar on a boat anchored at the correct distance. However the bees got to the edge of the lake and stopped, presumably because they know you don’t find sugar in lakes, which is also pretty clever.
A bee’s family tree is also linked to a mathematical sequence. While female worker bees get half their DNA from the mother and half from the father, male drone bees get all their DNA just from their mother.
This means a male bee only really has 1 parent (the Queen), but has 2 grand-parents (the Queen’s mother and father). It has 3 great-grand-parents (the Queen’s mother’s two parents plus the Queen’s father’s mother), 5 great-great-grand parents, 8 …, 13 … etc.
Whereas a female worker bee has 2 parents, but only 3 grand-parents, 5 great grand-parents, 8…, 13…. etc.
This means while the family trees are different, they both form part of a well known sequence of 1,1,2,3,5,8,13 … which is known as the Fibonacci sequence, where each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous 2 numbers. The same sequence is found in lots of other places in nature, such as the spirals of sunflowers, the numbers of petals on flowers, the spirals in pine cones etc.
As the sequence gets bigger, the ratio from one number to the next approaches 1.618, which is known as the Golden Ratio. And bizarrely, in any bee colony, the ratio of female bees to male bees turns out to be roughly 1.6.
The Golden Ratio is also associated with beauty, and is seen often seen in art such as Da Vinci’s Last Supper, where the dimensions of the table and the proportions of the walls and backgrounds are all based on the Golden Ratio as well as Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man. The Mona Lisa and the dimensions of the Parthenon in Athens also use this ratio.
Apparently this works for faces as well, and experiments have shown that people will typically judge faces as being more attractive if the ratios of measurements on the face, such as the ratio between the width of the face and the width of the eyes, is closer to the Golden Ratio.
So it turns out beauty might not be in the eye of the beholder after all, and its all down to simple maths.
