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Værker af Randolf Menzel

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This is partly the scientific autobiography of Randolf Menzel, who has been studying the brains of bees since the 1960s and led a large bee-research team at the Free University in Berlin until his retirement, and partly a (moderately) accessible summary of what we now know about how bees think and how we know it. Although the book is written as a first-person account by Menzel, science-journalist Matthias Eckoldt is credited as co-author and has obviously been responsible for livening up the text and making sure that technicalities are explained for the benefit of any readers who have not spent a lifetime in the field of insect neurophysiology.

From the title, I was rather expecting a book about bee behaviour, but Menzel's particular interest is in reverse-engineering the actual physiological processes that go on in the bee's brain during perception, learning, remembering and communicating. This kind of work is difficult to imagine: the brain is a cubic millimetre in size, and with one and a half million neurons Menzel argues that it is roughly comparable in processing power to a (2016) smartphone, although many times more energy efficient of course. Neurophysiologists can follow a tiny fraction of what is going on inside the brain by probing and staining individual neurons, but doing that whilst the bee is performing its normal tasks seems to be quite a challenge. Even more macroscopic behavioural experiments are far from trivial: individual bees can be tagged with barcodes, or even followed in flight by fitting them with tiny radar transponders, but it clearly took an awful lot of failed experiments and persistence before techniques like that could be made to work, and even more before the right conditions could be found to get useful results from them. But when it does work, it produces some very interesting data, including strong evidence (still contested by some) that bees carry a mental map of their territory in their memory and are not restricted to radial flights to and from the hive.

When I first read about social insects, I was very struck by the idea of a community of bees or ants as a "collective super-organism" of simple, robot-like creatures jointly possessing "hive intelligence". Menzel isn't really persuaded by this sort of argument. For him, bees are individuals capable of modifying their behaviour in complex ways based on their learnt experience, the current situation in the hive, the information they get from other bees (the dance), and what they find in the outside world. Any large community of organisms, even humans, can look like a collection of dumb automata if you study it from far enough away, he argues, imagining the proverbial aliens watching the Frankfurt rush-hour from their spaceship in orbit.

The book concludes with a short essay on neonicotinoid insecticides and the danger they pose to the nervous systems of bees. Menzel also suggests that bees, by virtue of the way they collect samples and amplify concentrations, could be used as sensitive monitors of illegal or accidental releases of toxic substances into the environment.
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thorold | Jul 10, 2022 |

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Værker
5
Medlemmer
23
Popularitet
#537,598
Vurdering
½ 3.3
Anmeldelser
1
ISBN
14
Sprog
2