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Science Quickly

Even without Hands Honeybees Show Handedness

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2017

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

About half the honeybees in a test exhibited no sidedness, but the other half was split 50–50 between righties and lefties—perhaps to navigate obstacles more efficiently.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.com.j.

0:23.9

That's y-A-K-U-L-T dot-C-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on YacL.

0:33.7

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science.

0:37.5

I'm Jason Goldman.

0:40.7

Honeybees, they have a difficult task.

0:44.1

First they have to find food.

0:46.0

Then they have to return to the hive to tell their compatriots where to find it.

0:50.2

The bees have to fly back and forth between the hive and their food over and over again,

0:54.7

and they need to deal with whatever obstacles lie along their flight paths.

0:59.3

Honeybees face a lot of challenge in choosing efficient foraging roots through dense environments,

1:05.6

and we basically want to study how they choose effective roots, the safest and these energy-expanding routes.

1:12.6

Mariel Ong, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia. To track the insect's

1:18.6

navigation, she and her team set up tiny obstacle courses for more than a hundred honeybees.

1:24.9

Along the way, the bees were forced to fly through one or the other of two

1:28.5

openings of different sizes. And as a group, the bees usually flew through the wider opening,

1:34.3

which makes sense, less chances of slamming their tiny bee bodies into a wall. But things

1:39.8

got more interesting when Aung looked at the decisions made by individual bees one by one.

1:45.0

We found that 55% had no biases, and then the rest of the 45% was a split between left-handed

...

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