Published in the Dec. 22 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Biology Letters was a paper with hand-drawn figures, colloquial phrases and jokes, and no citation of previous research.
Such an unconventional paper was the voice of 25 schoolchildren between the ages of 8 and 10 who attend Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. They conducted their study of bees through an educational program devised by neuroscientist Dr. Beau Lotto and Blackawton Primary School principal Dave Strudwick to teach the children about science.
“[The children] asked the questions, hypothesized the answers, designed the games (in other words, the experiments) to test these hypotheses, and analyzed the data. They also drew the figures (in colored pencil) and wrote the paper,” Lotto wrote in the abstract of the paper. “I trained the bees and transcribed the children’s words into text,” he said.
Buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) were used in the study. The children devised a rule that determined where sugar water was placed in panels of 16 circular holes arranged in rows of four, and tested how the bees learned the rule. During the training sessions, the four circles in the middle were lighted either blue or yellow, and the surrounding circles were in the other color.
“It was a difficult puzzle, because the bees could not just learn to go to the color of the flower,” the paper reads.
“Instead, they had to learn to go to one color (blue) if it was surrounded by the opposite color (yellow), but also to go to the opposite color (yellow) if it was surrounded by blue. We also wanted to know if all the bees solved the puzzle in the same way. If not, it would mean that bees have personality (if a bee goes to the blue flower every time, it tells us that it really likes blue).”
After the training, the bees were given three tests. In the first test, the colors were arranged in the same pattern as the training phase. Overall, the children found that the bees went to the middle circles more than the surrounding ones.
Looking at each bee individually, the children found that one bee mostly chose the correct circles both when they were blue and when they were yellow. Three other bees had a preference for one particular color (one of them blue and the others yellow) and didn’t go to the other color (except for one bee that did it once). These bees mostly chose the color they preferred when it was the correct color, but chose it only occasionally when it was the incorrect color. The remaining bee didn’t come out to make any choice.
“We conclude that one bee went to a mixture of colors in the correct locations, but the rest preferred one color over the other. However, although they preferred one color, they only went to the middle of the panel that had that color (as this is the flower that would have had a reward). This test shows that altogether the bees solved the puzzle very well, as their choices collectively were divided between all blue and yellow rewarding flowers,” the children said in the paper.
More: The Second Test
In the second test, all the circles in the middle were green, and the surrounding circles were either blue or yellow. The children wanted to know from this test whether the bees understood the rule the way they did (where blue circles were the correct ones if they were surrounded by yellow circles and vice versa) or whether the bees understood the correct circles as being those in the middle, regardless of what colors there were.
“The results tell us that three of the bees preferred to go to the colors that they had learned before, and avoided the middle green flowers,” the children found. “Two of the bees, however, mainly went to the middle flowers, including the B bee, which went to both correct yellow and correct blue flowers during the first (control) test. So they had learned to solve the puzzle using different rules.”
In the last test, the students wanted to know if any bee would solve the problem by going to the color that was the minority in a panel. So this time, the circles at the corners of the panels were of one color, and the other circles were of the other color. In this test, they found that the bees were choosing randomly.
“Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before,” the children said in the conclusion of the paper.
According to Discover Magazine, it wasn’t easy to get this study published as it doesn’t fit in with the status quo, lacking statistical analysis and references and being written in children’s words. After being rejected by several journals, Lotto asked other scientists to review the paper, which convinced Biology Letters to accept the paper.
A commentary of the study, written by Dr. Laurence Maloney of New York University and Dr. Natalie Hempel de Ibarra of the University of Exeter in the U.K., was published in Biology Letters along with the paper.
“The results provide convincing evidence that bees can transpose between learned color, pattern and spatial cues when encountering changes in a colored scene,” the scientists wrote.
“The resulting article is a remarkable demonstration of how natural scientific reasoning is for us. The insatiable curiosity that characterizes childhood, combined with the skeptical discipline of scientific method, provides a powerful tool that allows us to prosper and grow.”
Read the children’s paper here.
