May Bee Group meeting

1:30 - What's Happening in my Hive?

Followed by main meeting

Speaker - Adrian Dyer - Bee Colour Vision & Flower Evolution

Adrian is a Research Fellow at RMIT University investigating how both the introduced honeybee and native bees perceive colour, and how this has affected the evolution of flowers. He completed a PhD in 2000 (RMIT University) and was a Humboldt Fellow (Germany), a La Trobe Fellow (La Trobe University) and an Australian Research Council Fellow (Monash University). He also held a postdoctoral research positions at Cambridge University, and collaborates extensively with universities in France and the USA. His research has been published in leading journals including Nature, Science and Proceedings of the Royal Society; and has been featured on ABC TV as well as numerous international media outlets like The New York Times and the BBC.
 
Topic - Bee Colour Vision & Flower Evolution: Bee pollinators are responsible for providing about one third of our food, and vision is the principle sensory cue used by bees used to find flowers. Bee colour vision has shaped flower colour evolution in Australia, and globally; whilst different insects like hoverflies influence colour in a dramatically different way. In  complex natural environments there are many difficulties for bees like non-rewarding deceptive flowers, complex search and navigational tasks, and at a hive level management of nutritional resources to enable survival. Recent work shows that far from being simple reflexive animals, bee exhibit cognitive-type processing of rules to solve problems including using size relationships, spatial arrangements and numerical abilities. Bees can learn to understand the concept of zero and place this number at the lower end of a continuum, and can use symbolic representations of colour as mathematical operators to enable solving simple addition and subtraction tasks. This suggests that a key reason for the success of bees over evolutionary time has been the capacity of their mini brain to develop cognitive like processing, and some of the clever solutions they employ appear to hold important lessons for AI, and how we can improve design in an increasingly technological world.

NB - ECOSS is hosting a Ngulu Festival from 1:00pm that day so parking will be busier than usual

Come along and keep up to date with local conditions that effect your hive, connect with other beekeepers, share resources, improve your apiary skills and learn more about honeybee ecology.

Monthly meetings are usually the last Sunday of the month.

Meetings are held at ECOSS, 711 Old Warburton Road, Wesburn, in the newly renovated ‘Coop’ (past the old house, over the green, down the bottom).