A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns.

"We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from," the students wrote in the paper's abstract. "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."

The paper itself is well worth reading. It's written entirely in the kids' voices, complete with sound effects (part of the Methods section is subtitled, "'the puzzle'...duh duh duuuhhh") and figures drawn by hand in colored pencil.

The project, which began three years ago, grew out of a lecture neuroscientist Beau Lotto of University College London gave at the school, where his son Misha was a student. Lotto spoke about his research on human perception, bumblebees and robots, and then shared his ideas on how science is done: "Science is nothing more than a game."

"Nature's way for us to discover patterns and relationships is to play. That's the same aim that science has," Lotto said. "I think everyone does science every day. The scientific process is part of life."

After the talk, Lotto and Dave Strudwick, Blackawton Primary School's head teacher, decided to try to do an original research project with the students where the kids would have full control. Lotto also ran a scientific outreach program called Street Science, whose aim was to get non-scientists to do original experiments outside the lab. He and Strudwick wondered if the same idea would work in a classroom.

"It's so different from other science-education programs, where the aim is to learn facts," Lotto said.

Over the course of about two months, Strudwick and Lotto got the kids thinking about what questions interested them, and how they could solve those questions through puzzles or games. Eventually they focused their questions on bumblebees.

"If you want to ask a question of a bumblebee, you have to put yourself in the perspective of bumblebees," Lotto said. "So we had a day of being bumblebees."

Some of the initial questions were silly: Could bees learn to play Monopoly? What about soccer? But several questions, such as "Could bumblebees learn to associate color with heat?" had been addressed in scientific papers in the last 10 years, Lotto said.

Ultimately, the class decided to investigate whether bees could use spatial relationships between colors to figure out which flowers had sugar water in them, and which didn't. The question has interesting implications for bees in the wild, the kids pointed out. If some flowers are bad or have already been sucked dry of nectar, bees should learn to avoid them, "which is like a puzzle."

The students helped set up a Plexiglas bee hutch in a church near the school, and designed a series of puzzles for the bees to solve. In the first puzzle, the students placed an array of yellow and blue lighted circles at the end of the bee arena.

The circles were arranged so that half the time, four blue circles were surrounded by 12 yellow circles, and half the time the colors were swapped. Only the circles in the center had sugar water. In some trials, the outside circles had salt water.

"We did this so that they would learn not to go just to the colours, but had to learn the pattern," the students wrote. "Otherwise they might fail the test, and it would be a disaster."

After a learning trial in which the bees overwhelmingly chose the sugar-bearing "flowers," the students took the sugar water away to see if the bees would still go for the previously rewarding circles. The bees chose right 90.6 percent of the time, the kids reported.

The students then designed follow-up experiments to try to understand how the bees chose correctly. They built a similar setup with green flowers in the center to see if the bees used spatial patterns and ignored color. Most of the bees seemed confused and chose randomly, but two went straight to the green, central flowers.

Their finding is "novel, but not earth-shattering," Lotto said. Several independent reviewers "came back saying this is all sound," he added. "This is a unique finding, and the methods are as they should be."

"The data as they presented it is compelling," said psychologist Laurence Maloney of NYU, who wrote a commentary on the paper. "It's a very impressive performance by a group of students of that age. I wouldn't have thought they could do it."

Maloney found the fact that different bees seemed to take different strategies was intriguing from an evolutionary perspective.

"You could imagine one of the strengths of natural selection is that everyone has a slightly different strategy, and when presented with a problem, someone's strategy turns out to be the right one," he said. "It just gives me the chills to look at this kind of intelligence and know that it came about because of random choices between different individual animals."

Strudwick and Lotto faced some challenges getting public recognition for their students' work. They initially tried to get outside funding for the project, but were rejected.

"One of the referees said the kids couldn't do it. The other said it wasn't high enough cost-to-benefit ratio," Lotto said. "That just added fuel to fire."

Getting the paper published was a struggle as well. In particular, several journals got stuck on the fact that the paper doesn't cite any references. Lotto says they left the references out because the historical context wasn't what inspired the kids, anyway.

"That wasn't the basis for doing the experiment, it was what was interesting to them. That's the driver of any quality science study," Lotto said. "That's what I tell my PhD students: Don't do any reading. Figure out why you wake up in the morning, what you're passionate about, and then read the literature. But don't figure out what's interesting based on what other people say."

Strudwick says the project has completely changed the way Blackawton Primary School approaches science education, and that the students have a much more positive view of science now than three years ago. The students' scores on Britain's national science exams are well above average, too.

Misha Lotto, now 10, says his view of science changed thanks to the bees.

"I thought science was just like math, really boring," he said. "But now I see that it's actually quite fun. When you're curious, you can just make up your own experiment, so you can answer the question."

Some of the students now want to be scientists when they grow up, but some still want to be soccer players and rock stars. That's okay, Lotto says.

"If they don't turn out to be scientists, that's not a big deal," he said. "The hope is that this kind of program doesn't just create data and information and little scientists. Being uncomfortable with uncertainty, in fact being excited about not knowing – that's really what we're trying to foster through science."

Lotto and Strudwick are now developing a similar program called "i,scientist" at the Science Museum in London, where visitors and classes from nearby schools can do real experiments on-site. Strudwick hopes to help other schools develop their own student-driven science experiments.

"I certainly don't think this is something that only we could have done. It's something that lots of schools could do," he said. "It would be lovely to have this sense of community around learning all over the country and all over the world."

Images: 1) A buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris). Wikimedia Commons/Alvesgaspar. 2) Courtesy of Beau Lotto. 3) P.S. Blackawton et al/Current Biology 4) Courtesy of Beau Lotto.

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