Bees: amazing little creatures

One of the first articles I posted on this blog Zarafa's Bee-Hive Mind, was in April of 2007, about the ability of bees to recognize human faces. A World Science news item dated December 9, 2005 reports Adrian Dyer's study published in Journal of Experimental Biology, Honey Bees Can Recognize Human Faces!

"Scientists used to believe that facial recognition required a large brain. Adrian G. Dyer of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, a leading scientist in the field feels that this may not be the case. He found in his study on honey bees that even with a smaller brain than that of the humans, they could recognize human faces. According to Dyer the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species."
 
Bees are the most amazing little creatures, busy buzzing around, taking bundles of pollen on their little furry legs, around their knees, from that the expression "Like the bees knees" came I suppose! So they go from flower to flower and without them the plants would not be pollinated and bare fruit --- 

Our fruit and vegetables are highly contaminated with pesticides, the EWG  at this link you can get a down loadable list of highly toxic foods. The most toxic. Although it is best to eat organic produce whenever you can it is not always possible and there was an article in WSJ telling that --

The apple industry faces a potential public-relations headache in the wake of federal testing that found pesticide residues in 98% of America's second-most-popular fresh fruit, the highest rate among the produce screened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a yearly survey.

The last part of the article says the following about our little friends. "The World Science report adds: "The bees probably don’t understand what a human face is, Dyer said in an email. “To the bees the faces were spatial patterns (or strange looking flowers). Bees are famous for their pattern-recognition abilities, which scientists believe evolved in order to discriminate among flowers. As social insects, they can also tell apart their hive mates. But the new study shows that they can recognize human faces better than some humans can—with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells." 

Bravo little friends without you we are lost.

I appreciate the comments of thanks and gratitude from readers who come by this and any other zarafa sister sites of which, I must admit there are many, and who appreciate the collection of articles stored in one place  --- I do them as a repository, a place to keep important information, rather than putting it in my bookmark file.The bee issue is really dire and must be addressed in a profoundly pragmatic way. 
I will always be eternally grateful to Google for giving us this fabulous tool.