Are Bees Physicists?
Far-reaching research, and research that promises to join mathematics and biology, has been conducted by a mathematician at the University of Rochester, Barbara Shipman. She has described all the different forms of the honeybee dance using a single coherent mathematical or geometric structure (flag manifold). And interestingly, this structure is also the one that is used in the geometry of quarks, those tiny building blocks of protons and neutrons.
From this and technical evidence too complex to present for our purposes, Shipman speculates that the bees are sensitive to or interacting with quantum fields of quarks. Researchers have already established that bees are sensitive to the planet’s magnetic field, but they have always attributed it to the presence of a mineral in the bee’s abdomen. Shipman’s research indicates that the bees perceive these fields through some kind of quantum mechanical interaction between the quantum fields and the atoms in the membranes of certain cells.
