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Asked by anon-218611 to johnpaterson, Matthew (known as Kaan by on 10 Jun 2019.
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Matthew Alkan answered on 10 Jun 2019:
That is a very very good question! I am a chemist by training so i need to speak carefully but i will give it a go.
Behavior is a very complex thing which is influenced by many different things and it is very hard to only have one factor effecting behavior.
We do something kind of similar, but its not really looking directly at behavior its more using behavior to see if a factor change is noticed. so we train a bee using sugar to stick its tongue out when something happens like it smells a smell. We then count the number of times it sticks its tongue out when it smells this smell. We then do something to the smell and count the number of times it sticks its tongue out. If there is a difference in the number of times it sticks its toungue out then the change in factor is noticed.
I hope john can give a slightly better answer but i hope you find my comment useuful
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John Paterson answered on 10 Jun 2019:
It really depends on the behaviour that you’re looking at as behaviour is a very complex thing but the basic scientific method would be to first decide on what you’re looking at, then observe that behaviour happening, then change conditions and observe that behaviour again. Then you have data that you can analyse and see if a change has happened!
With my work, I want to know whether pollinators are coming out earlier in the year than they used to. Because I wasn’t around 50 years ago, I can’t make observations myself about when pollinators came out then. However in the UK we have groups of people who often go out and observe these things for fun. There are two groups in the UK, one who look at hoverflies and one who look at bees, who have been making notes on when they have seen a species of pollinator for decades, since the 1960s. I can therefore use their old data and compare it what we can see these days to see if it has changed. It has – most pollinators are coming out around 1 month earlier in the year now than they were in the 1960s. Using information like this, collected by people who aren’t scientists, is called ‘citizen science’ and it’s a really good way to get information you couldn’t collect on your own.
Looking at other behaviours would depend on the behaviour. As Matthew said, if you want to know whether a bee is hungry or likes a smell/food source then you can measure it sticking its tongue out. In our laboratory, some of the other scientists look at buzz pollination. This is when a bee buzzes against a flower to shake it and release pollen. They want to know whether bees can change this buzzing behaviour for different flowers, so they put bees on different kinds of flower and record their buzzing with a microphone. They can then look at the sound waves and see whether the bee’s behaviour has changed by whether it has buzzed differently.
So there are lots of ways of testing whether a behaviour has changed. As with any part of science, how you measure a change in something is based on what you’re measuring in the first place!
Comments
anon-218611 commented on :
Thank you that was really helpful and interesting. I think people my age think bees are annoying but now I know that bees hlp us more than we are helping them.