Who funds this research???

[SirFozzie]

Bees on cocaine: The facts • The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/23/bees_on_cocaine/)

News has emerged of the latest threat to nature: drug-addled bees, hopped up on crack by crazed scientists. Some bee experts believe that cocaine could have "as devastating an effect on honey bee society as it does on human society".

The scientists in question are Andrew Barron of Macquarie University in Australia and Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois, and some fellow bee and narcotics experts. The men, for reasons that seemed good to them at the time, got some bees hooked on cocaine and then turned them out to find some sugar...

...

More at the article.. but A) Who funds this shit? B) How do you come up with the idea? Do you see a bag of cocaine and say "Dude! I betcha it would really freak things out if you gave it to bees!". Or do you look at a beehive and say "Man, they're not agressive enough... what if we gave em some cocaine?"

[JPhillips]

Perhaps this part of the article is relevant:

The scientists believe that their work indicates the presence of a reward system in the bee brain, something never shown so far. They also think that more bee study will have relevance to the problems of human addiction.

[Young Drachma]

Here's a much better story about the study.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/23/cocaine-bees-australia-drug-research

It doesn't seem that interesting tho. In the story here, it says the bees came back and just did their dances more vigorously. But since they weren't lying about where stuff was, it stands to reason that the coke just makes them absolutely insane and they can't control their responses as well as they could otherwise.

That doesn't seem to be all that earthshattering a revelation. Other than, "well gee, no one else had tried that before."

The assumptions the first article made were far more interesting, than what the real story seems to reveal.

[Cringer]

More at the article.. but A) Who funds this shit? B) How do you come up with the idea? Do you SNORT a bag of cocaine and say "Dude! I betcha it would really freak things out if you gave it to bees!". Or do you look at a beehive and say "Man, they're not agressive enough... what if we gave em some cocaine?"

Fixed that for you.

[Marc Vaughan]

I was wondering if they thought they'd make good drug sniffers .... after all bee's travel a heck of a distance pollinating flowers ... can see it now, swarms of bee's chasing dealers down streets, looks good from here ;)

[cartman]

It took a bit of searching, but I found one of the research pics:

http://www.thegreatcornholio.com/images/snlbee.jpg

[QuikSand]

Setting aside the fertile ground for bee/coke jokes, I suspect the real truth is that just about any sort of research project, when deliberately packaged into a one-sentence summary, will sounds pretty pointless and stupid. And most of them, once you understand the motivation behind them, probably have some value.

There's a policy debate to be had, I suppose, whether the government should be in the business of sponsoring research at all... but one things we know for sure is that people who know nothing about a subject and then are exposed to a cherry-picked sentence or two about that subject are not in a great position to render useful judgment about it.

[cartman]

Setting aside the fertile ground for bee/coke jokes, I suspect the real truth is that just about any sort of research project, when deliberately packaged into a one-sentence summary, will sounds pretty pointless and stupid. And most of them, once you understand the motivation behind them, probably have some value.

There's a policy debate to be had, I suppose, whether the government should be in the business of sponsoring research at all... but one things we know for sure is that people who know nothing about a subject and then are exposed to a cherry-picked sentence or two about that subject are not in a great position to render useful judgment about it.

buzzkill