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 …
Reefer Madness
We need a movie, words alone aren't convincing enough.
It would also be interesting to see if the Bee actually did find more pollen and the levels it made prior to doping perhaps the waggle dance was not an exaggeration. I seem to remember the 80's was a good time for the UK, and we all know the dust was flying about quite liberally then.
sometimes I wonder about why we allow these people to have research money.....I'll bet some of the white powder goes walkies too....hmmmm
coking up innocent bees....that's sick people. What's next? Ants on acid? Humming birds on heroine? Termites on te 'eerb? If i gave blow to my dog to see how it affected his behaviour, I'd be justifiably locked up!
As soon as they have figured out how Bees get addicted they can then fix us humans, obviously being so close genetically speaking.
Right I'm off to a serious meeting that requires me to waggle dance my proposal to the CEO.
Mine's the one with yellow and black stripes and covered in pollen, sorry I meant cocaine.
New has emerged of a long-standing threat to unbiased basic research: money-crazed professors and post-docs willing to debase themselves shamelessly for hit after hit of government grant money. Some experts in the theory and philosophy of scientific research believe that government cash has "as devastating an effect on free inquiry as the Spanish Inquisition."
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All together now: And No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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"They also think that more bee study will have relevance to the problems of human addiction" or in other words "We've run out of money and would like a huge grant to investigate this further and keep us in work for the next few years".
Surely you investigate humans to find out the "problems of human addiction".
Or is this April 1st? Have I just been asleep for the past three and a half months?
Strung out scientist number 1: "Dude, I really need a hit, man, but I'm light."
SOSN2: "Don't stress, bro, we'll just start some craaaaazy project with some coke, and then we just cream off some of the samples..."
SOSN1: "What, like getting bees stoned?"
SONS2: "What have you been sniffing, homie!?!?!"
And the rest, as they say, is valued scientific research history...
Lewis - can I have some of that stuff you've bee'n smoking - or have the Apoitedans 'cracked' up on it? (How the little buggers can carve it up with a Gold Amex Card beats the fuc*k out of me. No credit cards in UK anymore, I understand?)
S'nuff said.
Have a good Christmas!
(Andus - former beekeeper, and _never_ a crack smoker - licked a few cracks in the pursuit of "Man Oysters" however, but that's another tail)
Another scientific study of highly questionable value. Oh yes please mr. scientist please do take more of my tax money to fund more grants for this "valuable" research. I desperately need to know if bees twisted on coke will perform fly by stingings, or put the female bees out on the stroll to fund their drug habit. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big advocate of scientific research but in all honesty I fail to see where their enlighten findings will lead us.
Now if they can make hybrid bees with freekin' laser beams all doped up and killing each other then I might be interested. Until then all I can say is, meh.
Icon cos sometimes I feel like common sense and reasoned thinking are alien concepts in today's world.
This is a bad joke on the students and on tax money by someone at the university who seems to have had too much fun with drugs in the past.
These students - or young researchers - will not learn anything from it besides of what they would have learned had they given cocaine to tomatoes. None of this will be of use in their futures - unless someone is expecting them to become social workers, who can turn drug addicts into royal worker bees. When asked by any employer regarding the type of research they did they proudly can tell to have had success with giving cocaine to bees?! They will wish to have taken samples out of a bull's anus instead and once they realize the situation they have been lead into.
I can see the splashy Hollywood film trailers now. /cue booming voice and suitably tense music... "In the last battle for civilization only one can survive. The bees and sharks form a tense alliance to over throw human beings once and for all..... No retreat... No surrender... Who will survive... Who will reign supreme. The genetically mutated cocaine driven sharks and bees with their ferocious lasers. Or the humans struggling against the onslaught?" /cue dramatic cut scene and more tense music.
The truth is that the "researchers" probably spent an entire year fucked off their tits and wanking onto a large pile of government grant money, then when it was time to show some results they made up a load of shit that nobody is ever likely to bother to try and prove wrong.
"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."
Cocaine is a stimulant, which unlike narcotics, increases awareness and/or activity within the sympathetic nervous system or the central nervous system, or both.
Heroin, morphine, opium are examples of narcotics. Narcotics blunt the senses and depress the nervous systems.
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.
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.
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.
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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