A very interesting study has been done that connects humans
on the autism spectrum scale and honeybees. At the University of Illinois,
Hagai Shpigler, is doing his post doctorate on a project that involved videoing
honeybee’s social interactions during two different scenarios. One type of interaction
recorded was putting a bee that was unfamiliar with a colony into that group
and the second was introducing an immature queen larva into the unfamiliar
group. In all, there were 245 groups of bees that had been brought in from
seven different colonies and used to collect data on how the bees would react to
the situations and then were ranked on it. The data resulted in 14% of the bees
not reacting to either situation they were in while most of the bees were found
to show a social reaction to atleast one of the situations. The team conducting
this project analyzed the bees who reacted to neither situation and took into account
their sets of genes and looked at possible similarities to genes in found in
the disorders of autism, depression, and schizophrenia. Genes found in autism
spectrum disorder were the only ones to have high similarity to genes found inthe bees of the 14% non social reactors. The researchers found this information
to be interesting and plan to possibly find ways to better understand autism
spectrum disorder on a molecular level in humans from looking at honey bees.
This article is really important because a majority of the world views the bees are harmful and a nuisance but in reality they are useful for many reasons. Along with these findings, bees are very important for our environment. We could continue to learn from the bees as long as their population lives on.
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