Steve Hawley wrote:
11. It's fun to do but you needn't plant any special plants for your bee's. They will fly up to three miles to find what they need to do what bee's do--they will soon know every black berry patch, privet patch, flower garden, blue berry orchard, etc within three miles..I watched a fascinating program the other day about algorithms, and an unsolvable one (at least thus far) is the Traveling Salesman Problem, in which you try to find the shortest route between multiple points without visiting the same point twice. This is applicable to bees because, as you wrote, they'll find all those spots and then begin visiting them and they have to do so in a highly efficient manner.
The program's host visited a bee researcher who attached a tiny pole that stuck up vertically from a bee's thorax, and then the bee was released into a field that contained multiple food sources for it. There was a radar set up at the field that tracked the bee's movements (via the signature of a tiny bead atop the tiny vertical pole), and it was fascinating to watch the bee experiment with different routes before it settled on the one it considered most efficient. It took a few tries, but the bee got it done.
War is god