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back to article Bees on cocaine: The facts

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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @AC Re: You lot are pretty cynical...

    It is not a pretty good idea, it is a sad and stupid idea. Set a bee hive on fire and watch it "cease to function properly". In a human society people start fighting the fire. Whatever comparison you are trying to make you will just be cruel to a bunch of insects. You need to know the effect on a human society before you can compare both. And what would be the point of that?

    Our society has declared the drug as illegal, it has studied it, it is fighting it and in parts of it is it still being consumed. That is the effect of cocaine on us and It is all functioning properly. Those who study its effect on bees are maybe the ones who have ceased to function properly, and I am not being cynical here.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Our society has declared the drug as illegal

    Which means, of course, that no research should ever be done on it, ever, because it's obviously bad or else it wouldn't be illegal in the first place, right?

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  3. skeptical i

    Still not seeing the relevance.

    One could argue that this experiment can demonstrate what happens when organized societies are faced with bad actors within those societies, but I don't entirely see how this translates to human societies (which, I assume, is the must-include clause for all research grants, i.e., "and this will better help us understand and address issues in human society by ... ") since (a) we had a large scale experiment in the early 1980s on the introduction of cocaine into society (think "Gordon Gekko", _Less Than Zero_, leg warmers), and (b) to my knowledge individual bees do not have free agency to the extent humans do (economic coercion aside). Interesting? Sure. Relevant? Not so sure.

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  4. theotherone

    who

    who funds this shit exactly?

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  5. Simon Brown
    Alien

    vaguely trying to take this research seriously

    Putting aside the howls of ridiule for a short moment, is it possible to consider that some useful information could come out of this research? They're suggesting that addiction functions even in the primitive brain of a bee. Humans, with far more complex brains, still suffer from addictions, even to stimulants, the reward system must be hard-wired into brains generally. Does this research give the lie to the "it's just will-power" approach to detox? Surely studies in primitive organisms on how to treat withdrawal could inform research on the human brain? Or is it just me that thinks we spend way too little time and money researching treatment for addictions generally? Given how much of our GDP is spent insuring our belongings against thefts carried out by junkies to feed their habits, one wonders why there is such an objection to these scientific studies.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Re: vaguely trying to take this research seriously

    If we get lucky then these researcher will develop the perfect cocaine. A cocaine without the negative side effects and the ability to give you the willpower to overcome any addictions.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Bees on cocaine

    Doing addiction research on bees looks exotic and weird. Doing research on rats or mice requires feeding quite a lot of paper to the research ethics bureaucracies. Several rounds of correspondence may be necessary to feed the pedants. The route from project idea to experiment is much shorter if one can find an insect model instead of a mammal model. So I predict there will be more work on bees.

    They're cheaper too.

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  8. Mike Crawshaw
    Black Helicopters

    @ theotherone

    "who funds this shit exactly?"

    Government grants. Which, thankfully in this case, means US and Australian taxpayers rather than you & me. Maybe DARPA will come up with a scheme to use bees to attack terrorists and reward them with cocaine. Or something.

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