Bee in mid air flight carrying pollen in pollen basket. Credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim
Bees are incredibly important to much of the world’s flora, and we are always happy to see when research on them is continuing. After all, the better we understand them, the better we can protect them. Elizabeth Preston reports for Discover Magazine’s blog that when young honeybees spend time in the hive, they spend more time sleeping afterwards, probably to absorb whatever they’re learning among all the other bees:
Facing a whole hive of bees at once can be overwhelming—even for a bee. Young honeybees sleep more after spending time in the hive than after being by themselves. They need the extra nap time, it seems, to build and maintain their learning brains.
The first surprising thing about this might be that insects sleep at all. “Since around the 1980s there is good evidence that insects show…characteristics of sleep,” says Guy Bloch, who studies bee behavior at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yes, their brains are tiny and organized differently from ours. But they rest in a similar way. And just as sleeping helps us sort through the new things we’ve learned each day, there’s evidence that sleep in bees and fruit flies is also tied up with memory and learning, Bloch says.
…Marie Clifford and Susan Waters, graduate researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, have found a way to get around scarce research funding: citizen scientists. The 
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