Smart Cookies: Young Tweens' Study of Bees Published in Scientific Journal!

This is so cool!

From Wired Magazine:  "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 study took two months to complete and was a collaboration between a neuroscientist at University College London, Beau Lotto, and Blackawton Primary School teacher Dave Strudwick (Professor Lotto's son, Misha, is a student at Blackawton).

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