Bee 75

A toy about learning by watching, after a bumblebee experiment I saw in a documentary.

In the real experiment, the sugar sits behind two doors: the blue one has to be pushed out of the way before the red one will open. Bees on their own almost never solve it. A bee trained to do it, number 75 in the film, demonstrates, and bees that watch her start solving it too. It's a two-step plan, "move this so I can move that", in a brain the size of a pinhead.

This is a toy model, not their data. Each bee tries an order (blue then red, or red then blue, or one door and give up). A bee on its own learns only from its own lucky successes. A watcher also copies a little of what it sees bee 75 do each time she succeeds. Run a few days with watching on and off and compare the curves.