Honeybees' DNA reveals 'human' side

[Teuthida]

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/inte...?id=1584062006

I was one of the authors on the paper, and I've been really been enjoying the intelligent feedback we have been getting from articles like this.

True, humans do not have the same genetic code as bees, but humans do share most of the same building blocks, and humans use them to build the same sorts of things in the same sorts of ways. A bee builds a neuron with basically the same sets of proteins we do, and the neuron works more or less the same way, at least to as we superficially understand it now.

The remarkable thing is that with about 6 orders of magnitude fewer neurons, bee can manage to do many things that even some mammals with huge brains cannot. Bees have very sophisticated social structures and even have their own *language*.

It is nothing short of fascinating that they do all this with so little "hardware". Sort of like running amazon.com on a micro-controller.