Andrew B Barron

• PhD Zoology, University of Cambridge
• Professor (Full) at Macquarie University

Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are hyped to revolutionize robotics. Here we question their utility. GPTs for autonomous robotics demand enormous and costly compute, excessive training times and (often) offboard wireless control. We contrast GPT state of the art with how tiny insect brains have achieved robust autonomy with none of these...

Bees are flexible and adaptive learners, capable of learning stimuli seen on arrival and at departure from flowers where they have fed. This gives bees the potential to learn all information associated with a feeding event, but it also presents the challenge of managing information that is irrelevant, inconsistent, or conflicting. Here, we examined...

Karl von Frisch's ground‐breaking research first demonstrated visual learning in the European honey bee ( Apis mellifera ). The study of Australian native bees and their cognitive abilities, however, is still a relatively new and emerging field. Here we examined visual cognition in the Australian stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria . First we tes...

Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are hyped to revolutionize robotics. Here we question their utility. GPTs for autonomous robotics demand enormous and costly compute, excessive training times and (often) offboard wireless control. We contrast GPT state of the art with how tiny insect brains have achieved robust autonomy with none of these...

Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are hyped to revolutionize robotics. Here we question their utility. GPTs for autonomous robotics demand enormous and costly compute, excessive training times and (often) offboard wireless control. We contrast GPT state of the art with how tiny insect brains have achieved robust autonomy with none of these...

The evolution of cognition can be understood in terms of a few major transitions —changes in the computational architecture of nervous systems that changed what cognitive capacities could be evolved by downstream lineages. We demonstrate how the idea of a major cognitive transition can be modeled in terms of where a system's effective computational...

Advancements in agricultural production have seen the rapid adoption of protected cropping systems globally. Such systems have been optimized for plant growth and efficiency, with little understanding of the potential impacts to key insect pollinators. Here, we investigate the effect of bird netting and polythene rain covers on the health and perfo...

Hybrid vegetable varieties have become essential for global agricultural production, offering key advantages for yield, quality and disease resistance. The production of hybrid seeds is however limited by pollination challenges, with these systems commonly associated with unattractive and low‐quality floral resources, isolated growing environments...

Bees are flexible and adaptive learners, capable of learning stimuli seen on arrival and at departure from flowers where they have fed. This gives bees the potential to learn all information associated with a feeding event, but it also presents the challenge of managing information that is irrelevant, inconsistent, or conflicting. Here, we examined...

How to identify ecological systems at risk of failure is a central question of modern biology and agriculture. Due to human impacts and global change, there is a growing need for early warning signals that identify when an ecological system is at risk of a state change before those changes become irreversible or extremely complex and costly to reme...

Huang et al. (1) make an exciting claim about a human-like dopamine-regulated neuromodulatory mechanism underlying food-seeking behavior in honey bees. Their claim is based on experiments designed to measure brain biogenic amine levels and manipulate receptor activity. We have concerns that need to be addressed before broad acceptance of their resu...

The comparative approach is a powerful way to explore the relationship between brain structure and cognitive function. Thus far the field has been dominated by the assumption that a bigger brain somehow means better cognition. Correlations between differences in brain size or neuron number between species and differences in specific cognitive abili...

The evolutionary history of animal cognition appears to involve a few major transitions: major changes that opened up new phylogenetic possibilities for cognition. Here, we review and contrast current transitional accounts of cognitive evolution. We discuss how an important feature of an evolutionary transition should be that it changes what is evo...

Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making, we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood...

Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making, we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood...

Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making, we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood...

Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making, we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood...

Simple Summary Biting and chewing insects, such as crickets, may not have regular meals. They have a foregut with a crop that permits food to be stored, and also for further processing of previously ingested food if they cannot find food. Does this short period of starvation cause any further changes in other parts of the digestive system? We found...

The role of the epigenome in phenotypic plasticity is unclear presently. Here we used a multiomics approach to explore the nature of the epigenome in developing honey bee (Apis mellifera) workers and queens. Our data clearly showed distinct queen and worker epigenomic landscapes during the developmental process. Differences in gene expression betwe...

Laboratory studies show detrimental effects of metal pollutants on invertebrate behaviour and cognition, even at low levels. Here, we report a field study of Western honey bees sampled from an historic mining site heavily contaminated with metal and metalloid pollution, particularly arsenic. We analysed more than 1,000 bees from five apiaries withi...

As you are reading this text, your eyes scan across the page, even if you keep your head perfectly still. New research reveals that flies can perform analogous retinal movements, despite their eyes being rigidly fixed to their heads.

Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood o...

The field of animal cognition does far more than simply extend cognition into zoology. Studying animal cognition helps researchers to comprehend the human mind.

Are animals' preferences determined by absolute memories for options (e.g. reward sizes) or by their remembered ranking (better/worse)? The only studies examining this question suggest humans and starlings utilise memories for both absolute and relative information. We show that bumblebees' learned preferences are based only on memories of ordinal...

Much of human cognition involves two different types of reasoning that operate together. Type 1 reasoning systems are intuitive and fast, whereas Type 2 reasoning systems are reflective and slow. Why has our cognition evolved with these features? Both systems are coherent and in most ecological circumstances either alone is capable of coming up wit...

Volatile odors from flowers play an important role in plant-pollinator interaction. The honeybee is an important generalist pollinator of many plants. Here, we explored whether any components of the odors of a range of honeybee-pollinated plants are commonly involved in the interaction between plants and honeybees. We used a needle trap system to c...

Measuring individual foraging performance of pollinators is crucial to guide environmental policies that aim at enhancing pollinator health and pollination services. Automated systems have been developed to track the activity of individual honey bees, but their deployment is extremely challenging. This has limited the assessment of individual forag...

The role of the epigenome in phenotypic plasticity is unclear presently. Here we used a multiomics approach (RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq and Hi-C) to explore the nature of the epigenome in developing honeybee (Apis mellifera) workers and queens. Our data showed that the distinct queen and worker epigenomic landscapes form during the developmental p...

Are animals' preferences determined by absolute memories for options (e.g., reward sizes) or by their remembered ranking (better/worse)? The only studies examining this question suggest humans and starlings utilize memories for both absolute and relative information. We show that bumblebees make decisions using only memories of ordinal comparisons....

Recognising previously visited locations is an important, but unsolved, task in autonomous navigation. Current visual place recognition (VPR) benchmarks typically challenge models to recover the position of a query image (or images) from sequential datasets that include both spatial and temporal components. Recently, Echo State Network (ESN) variet...

The distinct honey bee (Apis mellifera) worker and queen castes have become a model for the study of genomic mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity. Here we performed a Nanopore-based direct RNA sequencing with exceptionally long reads to compare the mRNA transcripts between queen and workers at three points during their larval development. We found t...

How neonicotinoid contamination affects honey bees remains controversial. Studies have yielded contradictory results, and few have examined effects on colony development. Here we report the results of a comprehensive five-year study of the effects of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid on honey bee colonies. Colonies fed 5 ng/g (ppb) imidacloprid in sug...

Whether animals can actively avoid food contaminated with harmful compounds through taste is key to assess their ecotoxicological risks. Here, we investigated the ability of honey bees to perceive and avoid food resources contaminated with common metal pollutants known to impair behaviour at low concentrations. In laboratory assays, bees did not di...

Understanding the cumulative risk of chemical mixtures at environmentally realistic concentrations is a key challenge in honey bee ecotoxicology. Ecotoxicogenomics, including transcriptomics, measures responses in individual organisms at the molecular level which can provide insights into the mechanisms underlying phenotypic responses induced by on...

Recognising previously visited locations is an important, but unsolved, task in autonomous navigation. Current visual place recognition (VPR) benchmarks typically challenge models to recover the position of a query image (or images) from sequential datasets that include both spatial and temporal components. Recently, Echo State Network (ESN) variet...

The distinct honey bee (Apis mellifera) worker and queen castes have become a model for the study of genomic mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity. Prior studies have explored differences in gene expression and methylation during development of the two castes, but thus far no study has performed a genome-wide analysis of differences in RNA processing...

Central place foraging pollinators tend to develop multi-destination routes (traplines) to exploit patchily distributed plant resources. While the formation of traplines by individual pollinators has been studied in detail, how populations of foragers use resources in a common area is an open question, difficult to address experimentally. We explor...

Whether animals can actively avoid food contaminated with harmful compounds through taste is key to understand their ecotoxicological risks. Here, we investigated the ability of honey bees to perceive and avoid food resources contaminated with common metal pollutants known to impair their cognition at low concentrations (lead, zinc and arsenic). In...

The world's insects are in trouble – changing how we use pesticides could help them recover, say Théotime Colin and Andrew B. Barron

Environmental pollutants can exert sublethal deleterious effects on animals. These include disruption of cognitive functions underlying crucial behaviours. While agrochemicals have been identified as a major threat to pollinators, metal pollutants, which are often found in complex mixtures, have so far been overlooked. Here we assessed the impact o...

How neonicotinoid contamination effects honey bees remains controversial. Studies have yielded contradictory results, and few have examined effects on colony development. Here we report the results of a comprehensive five-year study of the effects of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid on honey bee colonies. Colonies fed 5 ng/g (ppb) imidacloprid showed...

Pollutants can have severe detrimental effects on insects, even at sublethal doses, damaging developmental and cognitive processes involved in crucial behaviours. Agrochemicals have been identified as important causes of pollinator declines, but the impacts of other anthropogenic compounds, such as metallic trace elements in soils and waters, have...

The current decline of invertebrates worldwide is alarming. Several potential causes have been proposed but metal pollutants, while being widespread in the air, soils and water, have so far been largely overlooked. Here, we reviewed the results of 527 observations of the effects of arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury on terrestrial invertebrates. Th...

We examined how bees solve a visual discrimination task with stimuli commonly used in numerical cognition studies. Bees performed well on the task, but additional tests showed that they had learned continuous (non-numerical) cues. A network model using biologically plausible visual feature filtering and a simple associative rule was capable of lear...

Chemical miticides are used routinely in honey bee colonies worldwide as treatment for the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, but there have been very few long-term colony-level field studies of the impacts of miticides on the bees themselves. Lab-based studies with individual bees or bees in small groups have highlighted many negative effects of mi...

Environmental pollutants can exert sublethal deleterious effects on animals. These include disruption of cognitive functions underlying crucial behaviours. While agrochemicals have been identified as a major threat to pollinators, other compounds, such as heavy metals that are often found in complex mixtures, have largely been overlooked. Here, we...

Whether a female honey bee (Apis mellifera) develops into a worker or a queen depends on her nutrition during development, which changes the epigenome to alter the developmental trajectory. Beekeepers typically exploit this developmental plasticity to produce queen bee by transplanting worker larvae into queen cells to be reared as queens, thus red...

Central place foraging pollinators tend to develop multi-destination routes (traplines) to exploit several patchily distributed plant resources. While the formation of traplines by individual pollinators has been studied in details, how populations of individuals exploit resources in a common area is an open question difficult to address experiment...

The queen and worker castes of the honey bee are very distinct phenotypes that result from different epigenomically regulated developmental programs. In commercial queen rearing, it is common to produce queens by transplanting worker larvae to queen cells to be raised as queens. Here, we examined the consequences of this practice for queen ovary de...

Insecticide use could be reduced if dose recommendations move from a toxicological perspective (how much is needed to kill an insect pest) to an ecological perspective (how much is needed to protect a crop).

Honeybees forage on diverse flowers which vary in the amount and type of rewards they offer, and bees are challenged with maximizing the resources they gather for their colony. That bees are effective foragers is clear, but how bees solve this type of complex multi-choice task is unknown. Here, we set bees a five-comparison choice task in which fiv...

Queens and workers are very distinct phenotypes that develop from the same genome. Larvae from worker cells up to 3.5 d old can be transferred to larger queen cells and will subsequently be reared as queens and develop into functional queens. This has become a very popular queen rearing practice in contemporary apiculture. Here we used RNA-Seq to s...

Prior to leaving home, insects acquire visual landmark information through a series of well-choreographed walks or flights of learning [1, 2, 3, 4]. This information allows them to pinpoint goals both when in their vicinity [5, 6, 7] and from locations they have not previously visited [8, 9, 10]. It is presumed that animals returning home match mem...

For the materialist, the hard problem is fundamentally an explanatory problem. Solving it requires explaining why the relationship between brain and experience is the way it is and not some other way. We use the tools of the interventionist theory of explanation to show how a systematic experimental project could help move beyond the hard problem....

Honey bees forage on a range of flowers, all of which can vary unpredictably in the amount and type of rewards they offer. In this environment bees are challenged with maximising the resources they gather for their colony. That bees are effective foragers is clear, but how bees solve this type of complex multi-choice task is unknown. Here we challe...

Honey bees forage on a range of flowers, all of which can vary unpredictably in the amount and type of rewards they offer. In this environment bees are challenged with maximising the resources they gather for their colony. That bees are effective foragers is clear, but how bees solve this type of complex multi-choice task is unknown. Here we challe...

Despite growing concerns over the impacts of agricultural pesticides on honey bee health, miticides (a group of pesticides used within hives to kill bee parasites) have received little attention. We know very little about how miticides might affect bee cognition, particularly in interaction with other known stressors, such as crop insecticides. Vis...

State-of-the-art algorithms for visual place recognition, and related visual navigation systems, can be broadly split into two categories: computer-science-oriented models including deep learning or image retrieval-based techniques with minimal biological plausibility, and neuroscience-oriented dynamical networks that model temporal properties unde...

Human same-sex sexual attraction (SSSA) has long been considered to be an evolutionary puzzle. The trait is clearly biological: it is widespread and has a strong additive genetic basis, but how SSSA has evolved remains a subject of debate. Of itself, homosexual sexual behavior will not yield offspring, and consequently individuals expressing strong...

In honey bees (Apis mellifera), methyl palmitate (MP), methyl oleate (MO), methyl linoleate (ML), and methyl linolenate (MLN) are important pheromone components of the capping pheromones triggering the capping behavior of worker bees. In this study, we compared the amounts of these four pheromone components in the larvae of workers and drones, prio...

State-of-the-art algorithms for visual place recognition can be broadly split into two categories: computationally expensive deep-learning/image retrieval based techniques with minimal biological plausibility, and computationally cheap, biologically inspired models that yield poor performance in real-world environments. In this paper we present a n...

The desire to collapse human sexual orientation into two neat categories risks drawing false conclusions, says Andrew Barron

There is increasing worldwide concern about the impacts of pesticide residues on honey bees and bee colony survival, but how sublethal effects of pesticides on bees might cause colony failure remains highly controversial, with field data giving very mixed results. To explore how trace levels of the neonicotinoid pesticide imidacloprid impacted colo...

Influences from the mother on offspring phenotype, known as maternal effects, are an important cause of adaptive phenotypic plasticity [1, 2]. Eusocial insects show dramatic phenotypic plasticity with morphologically distinct reproductive (queen) and worker castes [3, 4]. The dominant paradigm for honeybees (Apis mellifera) is that castes are envir...

Honey bee foragers must supply their colony with a balance of pollen and nectar to sustain optimal colony development. Inter-individual behavioural variability among foragers is observed in terms of activity levels and nectar vs. pollen collection, however the causes of such variation are still open questions. Here we explored the relationship betw...

Pesticide residues have been linked to reduced bee health and increased honey bee colony failure. Most research to date has investigated the role of pesticides on individual honey bees, and it is still unclear how trace levels of pesticides change colony viability and productivity over seasonal time scales. To address this question we exposed stand...

Free online access: https://rdcu.be/bnYjL . The parasitic mite Varroa destructor is a major threat to the European honey bee Apis mellifera. Beekeepers apply the miticide thymol directly within the hives to kill this parasitic mite. Thymol is repellent to bees and causes them to ventilate the hive, yet its impact on bee hygienic behaviours that pr...

Biogenic amines modulate a range of social behaviours, including sociability and mechanisms of group cohesion, in both vertebrates and invertebrates. Here, we tested if the biogenic amines modulate honey bee (Apis mellifera) sociability and nestmate affiliation. We examined the consequences of treatments with biogenic amines, agonists and antagonis...

Precise, objective data on brood and honey levels in honey bee colonies can be obtained through the analysis of hive frame photographs. However, accurate analysis of all the frame photographs from medium- to large-scale experiments is time-consuming. This limits the number of hives than can be practically included in honeybee studies. Faster estima...

Inner frame area, capped honey area and capped brood area measured by the different observers with the different methods on 30 pictures of hive frames. (XLSX)

Confidence intervals and estimated marginal means for the proportion of honey stored in the frames 1 to 7 of the bottom box. (XLSX)

Box and whiskers plots of the percentage of each frame covered by capped honey for each of the eight evaluations. A top box was added in January 2017. The 8th frame of each bottom box was replaced by a frame feeder used during colony establishment and left in the hives. Hives were left undisturbed during Winter (between May 2017 and August 2017). L...

Program file written in Python containing the software CombCount. (PY)

Instructions to launch CombCount and change the default parameters of the software. (DOCX)

Percentage of capped brood and capped honey on the frames of the sixteen hives used in this study (Fig 6), and of the honey mass stored in each hive estimated from the photos and from the frame weight (Fig 5). (XLSX)

Estimated marginal means (black dot) +/- standard errors (shaded area) of the proportion of honey on each frame. The degree to which arrows overlap reflects as much as possible the significance of the comparison of the two estimates. (TIFF)

Box and whiskers plots of the percentage of each frame covered by capped brood for each of the eight evaluations. A top box was added in January 2017. The 8th frame of each bottom box was replaced by a frame feeder used during colony establishment and left in the hives. Hives were left undisturbed during Winter (between May 2017 and August 2017). L...

The capacity to learn abstract concepts such as ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ is considered a higher-order cognitive function, typically thought to be dependent on top-down neocortical processing. It is therefore surprising that honey bees apparantly have this capacity. Here we report a model of the structures of the honey bee brain that can learn sa...