"Biodetectives"

Bringing the "wanted poster in the post office" concept into the 21st century, the FBI has begun using facial recognition software to identify fugitives on North Carolina highways. The software measures the biometric features of thousands of motorists' DMV photos, matching them against mugshots. When the face matches that of a known criminal, the authorities jump into action.

Now bringing FBI concept to nature, scientists have found that they can train bees to recognize the arrangement of human facial features, by rewarding the classy striped insects with sugar. That could inspire new facial recognition systems, given that bees manage this feat with brains the size of a microdot.

It turns out that bees don't consciously recognize individual people, so much as the relative pattern that makes up a face. Researchers tested this by first training the bees to recognize simple faces made of dots and slashes, and then seeing if the bees could distinguish between two different faces. The bees passed the test.

In German airports honeybees are also being used as “biodetectives” to monitor air quality by regularly testing their honey for a suit of pollutants. The latest about the bees are that they have showed themselves smatter than sophisticated computers, as far as routs among several flowers goes.

They learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they find the flowers in a different order, according to a new British study.

Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/bees-beat-computers-ability-solve-complex-math-problem

This small creature is able of doing so many things! When I wrote that article about “how to make our dreams come true” I also used a bee figure to exemplify the beehive complexity. Now I keep wondering if bees could be trained to identify criminal faces and still explore the locations of the fugitives and quickly figured out the shortest paths among their caches. In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimizes travel distance. They navigate using angles of sunlight, which helps them find their way home. To do this, their tiny brains must pack a powerful memory.