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The Sweet Emotional Life of Bees (nytimes.com)
35 points by dnetesn on Oct 2, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



As a beekeeper, and one who does it for the bees rather than the honey (one kind of emotional motivation rather than another), there's a balance to be struck when using human emotions to describe bees (beyond the simplistic "don't anthropomorphize").

I blogged about it yesterday: http://blog.afandian.com/2016/09/first-honey/


My friend worked for several years in undergrad on whether or not bees had individual personalities (this was her simplified description to me). So I asked her whether bees did have individual personalities, and her response was a flat "Nope".

The "emotions" that they're describing here are really more like states in a finite state machine. Calling them emotions obfuscates the science.

However, there might be a fun angle to building a brain out of increasingly complex emotional FSMs.




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