[Diogenesian]

Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.

[rob74]

You mean honeybees? Because there are lots of other (wild) bee species that are very specialized. And they also contradict most of the other things we think we know about bees: they are usually solitary, and they rarely sting (honeybees only do that to protect the hive).

Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?

[ggus]

Around my location (southern brazil) there are hundreds of species of stingless bees, living in colonies. Many (most?) produce honey too. I don't dispute that there are also lots of solitary bees. Bees are wonderful and way more diverse than people usually think.

[lanstin]

As is so often the case with biology on earth.

[actionfromafar]

Thanks, I never thought about bees like that. They certainly can use many types of flowers, as evidenced by various sorts of honey. Nitpick: some spiders are pretty darn intelligent and even seem to dream when they sleep, apparently.

[stinos]

> They certainly can use many types of flowers

Note there are various species who're oligolectic meaning they only collect pollen and nectar - and hence pollinate only - a single family or sometimes even single species of plants. Moreover they are usually also better at pollinating than more generalistic species especially honeybees.

[yubblegum]

Now I am musing about spider nightmares.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Thousands of tiny humans crawling all over you...

[amarant]

Or perhaps all of your thousands of children being in peril, having found themselves on a murderous human, with no obvious path to escape as the gigantic scary human swaths hundreds at a time?

[ta8903]

There's a reason the average spider sleepwalks into 8 human mouths a year.

[robocat]

One spider, 8 mouths: what are they pollinating?

[palata]

Is that how the mother gets the seed from the father?

[yubblegum]

You really didn't have to share this.

[datakan]

Jumping spiders are smarter

[Diogenesian]

Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3357

[datakan]

Obviously you can't give them an IQ test but all the data I've seen (and I am no expert here) shows they are possible the smartest arthropod out there. There are of course different species of jumping spider so mileage may vary.

[neutronicus]

That’s definitely the premise Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time haha

[nephihaha]

I've watched videos of them stalking prey and they seem extremely intelligent for their size. It's very impressive.

Bees' intelligence relies on them being a hive organism.

[WhyIsItAlwaysHN]

Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...

[adrian_b]

Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.

Aristotle used the word "insects" for all terrestrial arthropods and this was followed for millennia until the last two centuries when someone preferred to use "Insecta" instead of "Hexapoda", without giving any reason for this, and others followed this taxonomy.

Even so, the exact extent of the term "insects" varies between biologists, because some do not include all wingless hexapods under "insects".

In an informal discussion, I do not see any mistake in using the word "insects" with its original meaning from Aristotle, which is also the meaning that can be encountered in a lot of old books. For unambiguous animal classification, the word "hexapods" is preferable.

[WhyIsItAlwaysHN]

This is a discussion about animal intelligence. Jumping spiders have a different brain layout than bees, which are formally insects. Other insects are more like the bee than spiders.

So in this case, it matters that spiders are not in fact insects in the strict sense.

[palata]

This is explicitly a thread about arthropods, though.

Quote from above:

> they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod

[gmfawcett]

> Restricting the word "insects" to hexapods is a modern convention that does not have any basis in etymology.

This is one of those very rare cases in which "entomology" or "etymology" might have been chosen without the intended meaning being clear. :)

[cubefox]

But they are arthropods.