The Humble Bee

A common, everyday challenge—whether going on a shopping spree to several stores at the mall, visiting multiple tourist attractions while on vacation, or delivering pallets full of parcels all over a city, state, or country—is called the “Traveling Salesman Problem” (TSP).

The TSP’s goal is for a person, given a list of specific destinations, to find the shortest, most efficient route where each location can be visited once and then have the visitor return “home.” It is a well-known algorithmic problem in the field of computer science that mathematicians and computer scientists have spent decades trying to solve.

As anything more than a handful of locations increases, the complexity of the problem begins to increase dramatically, to the point where certain industries (those dealing with traffic management, online information flow, and business supply chains) are faced with TSP problems of staggering proportions.

One way the problem can be solved is by analyzing every round-trip route to determine the shortest one. However, with just 10 destinations, there can be more than 300,000 round-trip combinations, and by adding just 5 more (15 destinations), the number of possible routes could exceed 87 billion!

The introduction of even a few more destinations can increase the complexity of the TSP equation to the point of surpassing the capabilities of many computers and keeping even our most efficient ones busy for long periods of time.

If only we knew of a brilliant enough mind to be able to solve this dilemma quickly and efficiently. Where to look . . . where to look . . .

But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? (Job 12:7–9)

Supercomputing—All in a Day’s Work

Surprisingly to many, there is a common (and hardly elegant) insect that solves this conundrum on the fly. It’s all part of a day’s work for the ever busy, always buzzing, humble bee.

And considering the size of their craniums in comparison to the largest computer that humans have ever built1 (IBM’s $67 billion SAGE [Semi-Automatic Ground Environment] system, weighing more than 250 tons in total and spread over 20,000 square feet, was built during the 1950s by over 7,000 employees), it’s quite the accomplishment for what many would consider such a “primitive” and simple creature.

Indeed, the average bumble bee brain is less than two cubic millimeters in volume2 and weighs 2–3 mg, which is about 0.0002% of the volume of the average human brain, which weighs about 1300 grams or 3 pounds. However, the average person can’t even come close to solving the TSP like your local backyard’s busy body can.

As Professor Lars Chittka (from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences–University of London) stated in 2010,

In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home—not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead!3

What’s even more surprising is that bees aren’t easily fooled. By using artificial computer-controlled flowers, researchers have discovered that bees do this “even if they discover the flowers in a different order.”4

What’s even more surprising is that bees aren’t easily fooled.

Chittka notes that although bees calculate such things rapidly and routinely with their sesame-seed-size brains, these types of computations rival human technology.

Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days.5

Fantastic Flyers

Comparing bee brains to supercomputers isn’t a stretch, because the “software package” inside their minds contains far more capabilities than most people think about, including their incredible flight capability.

Interestingly, early scientists studying them concluded bees shouldn’t have the ability to fly whatsoever, as their wing size and bulky bodies made their mode of transportation a mystery. French zoologist Antoine Magnan was one such researcher who made careful studies of bumblebee flight and concluded that they were mechanically incapable of flight despite their obvious ability to do so.

Commenting on Magnan’s 1934 work Le Vol des Insectes in one of his own works, insect expert Dr. Ross Hutchins quipped,

Fortunately, the bumble bees never heard this bit of news and so went on flying as usual.6

Of course, with what we know about their flying skills today, bees’ agility while flying and accuracy and sensitivity when landing (whether on a flat, angled, or inverted surface) is the envy of human aviation engineers and pilots. As Douglas Fox reported for New Scientist,

Such airborne agility is especially remarkable when you consider that the honeybee does it all on a shoestring, neurologically speaking. Its brain is only as big as a sesame seed, which is less than a millionth the size of the human brain.7

Indeed, bees have the equivalent of (if not the superior to) the compasses, gyroscopes, and airspeed gauges modern aircraft utilize, as well as UV sensors to track the horizon and measure tilt. And they also have compound eyes comprised of 7,000 hexagonal facets which are superbly designed for detecting motion, which is used for navigation via a process called optic flow.

Optic Flow Monitoring

Optic flow provides the bees with the ability to discern various possibilities of action within their environment, allowing them to perceive the shape, distance, and movement of objects in the world and then control their locomotion in relation to them.

This onboard biotechnology provides bees with a sophisticated guidance strategy.

All of this onboard biotechnology provides bees with a sophisticated guidance strategy for landing on a variety of surfaces of differing orientation as well as surface tension and avoiding any “crash landings” while performing their daily duties.

While we may view our local honeybees moving from place to place and touching down here and there in our backyards as mundane, we shouldn’t forget that landing safely is one of the most difficult aspects of flight because the speed and rate of approach has to be reduced to near zero upon touchdown.

And yet, whether on approach to hang upside down on a flower petal or to plunk down on your porch rail, bees achieve this and many more landings throughout their travels with extreme ease—and do so hundreds of times per day.

After years of attempts (ranging from complete failures to varying degrees of success) to design an efficient artificial intelligence (AI) landing system for robot aircraft of all kinds, involving GPS systems, lasers, sonars, and radar technology, engineers have bowed to the brilliant, yet (what an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called) “simple”8 tactic that bees employ.

Can We Borrow That?

That solution is using what’s known as optic flow monitoring “by simply ensuring that the surface they are approacheing expands at a constant rate within their field of vision.”9 In studying how bees use this method to touch down on a platform safely, another professor explained,

If you come in at a constant speed, the image appears to expand faster as you get closer. But if you keep the rate of expansion of the image constant, you automatically slow down and by the time you make contact you’re moving at almost zero speed.10

Of course, such bee-inspired strategy is now used prolifically among aviation experts everywhere, with the use of drones becoming commonplace because of it. As a Nature journal article stated,

We are witnessing the advent of a new era of robots — drones — that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments.11

These performance methods are being analyzed and adopted by those seeking to employ them in spacecraft and spy drones.

And these performance methods are being analyzed and adopted by those seeking to employ them in spacecraft and spy drones:

That honeybees and other insects accomplish so much with so little hasn’t been lost on the likes of NASA and the US and Australian departments of defence.12

Their purpose of which is

to create the next generation of Mars probes and military spy robots. The plan is to build tiny flying craft that can navigate autonomously, seeing, thinking and avoiding danger using the same tricks insects have for over 350 million years.13

Of course, believing that a process involving no cognitive processes whatsoever (the story of evolution) somehow produced a creature with capabilities our most intelligent minds on the planet cannot even come close to requires some serious cognitive dissonance. More on that later, but for now, back to bees.

UV Scanning Surprise

The capabilities incorporated into a bee’s eyes are truly incredible. In addition to their using optic flow to fly and land safely, they also use it for measuring the distance to food sources they’ve discovered so they can communicate that information to other bees in their colony by performing a series of motions referred to as a “waggle dance.”

Bees’ eyes also see in ultraviolet, so they perceive and interact with the world in ways we do not.

Not only that, but (as touched upon earlier) through the use of ultraviolet photography, we now know that bees’ eyes also see in ultraviolet, so they perceive and interact with the world in ways we do not.

For example, while a flower may provide us with pleasure because of how colorful, pungent, and pretty we perceive them as, bees need them for more urgent and practical purposes—to extract the nectar and pollen inside them for food.

And of course, bees pollinate flowers as they forage among them, so it would benefit these plants if they were to somehow better assist bees by directing them toward their target zone, and they do.

While we see a pretty shape and color, bees see light in a way that makes a flower look more like a dartboard with a bullseye. As Scientific American stated,

Bees can see ultraviolet wavelengths and as it turns out, flowers have patterns of UV within their petals which attract bees and point out the treasure trove of nectar and pollen awaiting them at their center. I had always thought that bees were drawn to the bright colors of flowers that we humans appreciate but actually, we see the same flower quite differently than they do.14

This symbiotic relationship benefits them both, and they each demonstrate design features that show just how complementary for one another they were created.

I Heard You Coming

Case in point: research has now shown that maybe those people who talk to their plants aren’t as strange as we thought. Science has now demonstrated that plants are indeed “listening”! An impressive study with 17 scientists participating concluded,

Not only can plants “hear,” but they can rapidly respond to certain sounds, new research has shown.15

Now while plants don’t have ears of the same kind as animals and people do, astoundingly, it seems that some flowers function like an ear by vibrating in response to certain noises from pollinators—particularly to the buzzing of nearby bees. And upon receiving these signals, these plants activate certain protocols designed to lure said bees to them.

Researchers noted that upon playing a recording of a bee buzzing near some evening primrose flowers, within three minutes they began to produce sweeter nectar!

Researchers noted that upon playing a recording of a bee buzzing near some evening primrose flowers, within three minutes they began to produce sweeter nectar! Bees have an acute sense of smell (and can discern concentration differences as small as 1–3%), so when it was discovered that this activity increased the concentration of sugar in the plant’s nectar by 20% (on average), it was obvious that these plants were incentivizing the nearby fuzzy fliers to come visit them, increasing the chances of pollination.

This is an incredibly efficient, sophisticated, and mutually beneficial process between plants and bees. Plants cannot afford to waste resources by producing high-grade nectar constantly (in addition, exposed nectar is subject to degradation by microbes), and bees cannot afford the time and energy to visit every flower in the area. So this “on-demand” delivery system is truly a win-win strategy for both parties.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Now, once an individual honeybee finds a good source of nectar and/or pollen, she will travel back to her colony to recruit more workers to collect it, as “an industrious colony may produce 150 pounds of honey during a year’s warm season.”16 And to help others know what they’re looking for, she does two specific things.

First, she will bring a sample of the resource she’s found back with her and share it by regurgitating it from her honey stomach for the others to taste and smell, in order to familiarize themselves with what to look for in their newfound target.

Next, she will give detailed directions to the other bees by performing a specific set of movements that help the watching bees locate the correct flower patch outside the hive. This is commonly referred to as the waggle dance.

“The bee performs this dance in a figure-eight pattern,”17 by traveling in a straight line while wagging her tail and then swinging around in a half circle to come back to her starting point. She then repeats the exact same route except for performing the half circle on the opposite side, which is what creates the figure eight.

Presumably, this is done so that no matter where the others watching are situated, they all get the same directions. And to ensure the others “get the message,” she may do this same routine dozens of times.

Amazingly, the straight line the bee travels indicates the exact direction the food cache is located, and “the distance to the food source is measured by the number of wags”18 the bee makes while doing it, with each wag presumably representing a unit of distance that is somehow known by every bee present.

However, the line in which the scout travels is always in relation to “the precise angle at which [the others will need] to fly relative to the sun.”19 Outside the hive, bees look at the position of the sun, and fly at the same angle away from the sun. And because bees somehow always know which way is up and which way is down inside their hive, they are able to use this when communicating directions to the others.

For example, “if the bee runs 60 degrees to the left, the bees will fly at a 60-degree angle to the left of the sun. A bee even makes compensation as the sun’s position changes through the passing of time.”20 And this is the incredible way that “simple” bees can communicate to other bees how “the bees can fly directly to a food source by decoding this waggle dance.”21

Of course, this shouldn’t be too surprising to those who believe their Bibles. Genesis 1:14 tells us that God created the sun, moon, and stars “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,” and presumably that doesn’t mean only for us humans.

Just as ancient explorers, sailors, and travelers used the stars to help them reach their destinations (and we can still do that today), insects and animals of all sorts do as well—showing that the sun, moon, and stars do an excellent job at exactly what they were designed to do.

Denying the Obvious

Once again, we see the truth of God’s Word reflected in the world around us, even in something as common as the humble bee.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

Given what we’ve seen with just one of God’s creatures, there’s absolutely no reason to believe the atheistic “creation story” that is espoused everywhere in our state-run education centers and mainstream media outlets—the story of evolution.

Naturalists claim that this invisible process (no one has observed evolution) operates without any intelligence behind it whatsoever, and yet it is supposed to have produced billions of living things that demonstrate engineering prowess and fine-tuned functionality beyond anything humans have come close to.

So marvelous are designs found in nature that scientists often look to them for ideas because they lack the ingenuity to come up with solutions themselves.

As a matter of fact, so marvelous are designs found in nature that scientists often look to them for ideas because they lack the ingenuity to come up with solutions themselves. As one researcher from McGill University stated,

One very promising avenue in nanotechnology is the idea of imitating, or down right stealing, designs found in nature.22

And Jack Szostak (from Harvard Medical School), considered a leader in the field of “artificial life,” has outright admitted,

We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened.23

Just let that sink in for a moment. Here we have a situation where some of the most brilliant minds on the planet are declaring that matter, having no intelligence, somehow has the capability to produce minds with incredible intelligence.

In fact, they believe that this non-thinking, invisible process has somehow managed to produce cognitive capacity that allows simple insects to have functional capabilities beyond the scope of the whole combined sum of collaborative human knowledge to produce.

Where Did the Bee’s Brain Come From?

For example, in regard to his extensive study on bees, “Dr. Mathieu Lihoreau . . .  says this shows that, despite a limited number of nerve cells in their brains, bees obviously have ‘advanced cognitive capacities.’ The researchers express the hope that one day it might be possible to understand how such amazing processing feats are achieved with such minimal ‘hardware.’”24

Where did the programming come from?

However, such feats as bees perform are not a learned skill—they are a programmed ability inherited from their ancestors. So the real question is where did the programming come from? If in our experience brilliant computer hardware engineers and software programmers with minds are required to design supercomputers that can’t come close to matching what a bee can do, how incredible is the mind of the Designer of the bee?

But invoking the Creator God has become anathema in nearly all scientific circles now. As S. C. Todd rightfully pointed out in a correspondence to Nature journal,

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.25

Indeed, seldom do we see the truth of Scripture being played out more obviously than in people’s denial of God and attempt to impute a naturalistic explanation for his creative intelligent design, so apparent in the world, to the creation itself. One (of countless) such examples comes from a McGill University article.

Nature has devised countless engineering solutions to nanoscale problems, often finding extremely efficient and powerful resolutions.26

Seeing the Creator in Creation

Unfortunately today, the world praises and attributes godlike powers to nature instead of giving glory to God where it belongs. As Scripture says,

Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. (Romans 1:22–25)

So don’t be shy in bringing up these insights into God’s creation to your unsaved neighbors, family, and friends. Many of them need to look past God’s marvelous creatures and see their Creator, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps it will give them something to ponder next time you sit down together and sip a cup of tea with honey donated by the flying supercomputer we simply call the bee.