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To: bert
Knowing bees can detect explosives should induce study to learn how the massage can be communicated at a higher, more detailed level.

Do you mean to refer to getting or to giving bee massages? ...And what have massages got to do with explosives or bee tongues? :-P

16 posted on 12/08/2006 5:31:29 PM PST by lepton ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)
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To: lepton

......Do you mean to refer to getting or to giving bee massages? ...And what have massages got to do with explosives or bee tongues.......

Communicate implies twoway information flow. We have determined how to receive certain bee internal colony messages but don't know how to send such messages.

The detection of explosives is an exercise similar to research on alerting the colony to water and nectar. In this case the extension of the tongue is like a Pavlovian reflex to sugar water. Pavlov's dogs salivated when the bell rang. The bees extend the proboscis when they smell explosives.

The link is that we know that bees can communicate very complex information and can in fact detect explosives. If we knew more about the complex bee communication, we could improve on the amount of info known about explosives.

Bees are able to communicate within their colony the presence, precise location and relative quantity of nectar bearing flowers and water. The trick would be to learn to communicate the same data for bee detectable explosives or other substances with a complex odor signature.


19 posted on 12/09/2006 4:30:16 AM PST by bert (K.E. N.P. Rozerem commercials give me nightmares)
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