What Scientists Do All Day

Science at a Distance

Quantitative Observations
and
Knowing the Truth

loved honey and spent a lot of his time studying the habits of bees.

One day he thought he had made an interesting qualitative observation. It appeared that older bees searched for flowers and nectar that were further away from the hive. While younger bees, it seemed, liked to search for flowers closer to the hive.

This was an interesting idea, or hypothesis, but could it be tested using the scientific method? Or was it impossible to find out where young and old bees looked for flowers?

He thought about this problem for some time and then devised the following experiment:

He sat by the hive and as the new bees emerged for the first time he put a tiny spot of paint on their backs, and wrote down in his data book the date and time this bee first came out of the hive. In this way he could always identify a single bee again, and he would also know how old it was.

Then he went and sat near flowers that were further and further away from the hive and watched the bees that visited them. Every time he saw a bee he noted the color of the paint on its back and thus knew how old the bee was.

Throughout the summer, as the hive of bees matured and there were more older and older bees, he repeated the experiment over and over again.

At the end of a long summer he had a lot of data about the age of bees and where they hunted for flowers and nectar, but did it make any sense?

Why don't you repeat Brother Gregory's investigation and see what happens?

In the investigation below, choose the experiment (1 through 7), and then generate two sets of results. These results represent the number of bees (young and old) collecting nectar at different distances from the hive. As Mendel did, write down the results.

Raw data is very hard to interpret, so there is a second way of looking at your result. Plot a graph. A quick look at what these graphs will look like is provided by the computer. Take a look.

Don't forget, you can read more about Brother Gregory, and his adventures, elsewhere on this web site.

Brother Gregory and the Bee Experiment

Experiment Number:

No. 1
Young hive No. 2 No. 3 No. 4 No. 5 No. 6 No. 7
Old hive

Results of Experiment:

Distance from Hive ----
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20

Conclusions
What could Brother Gregory conclude from all these results?
Quantitative data consists of numbers (numbers of bees, distance from hive, age of hive, etc.). In this investigation Brother Gregory made Quantitative observations. He counted the number of bees collecting nectar and different distances from the hive. But what does this type of data mean and how should he interpret it?
In Experiment #2, for example, at a distance of one unit from the hive, Brother Gregory counted 1 old bee and 4 young bees. Is this result significant? Does it prove the hypothesis that young bees forage closer to the hive than do older bees?
Also, as the hive ages during the summer months, there are more old bees, and the old bees are more experienced. But young bees are still being born. Are older bees moving further and further away from the hive? Do all young bees stay near the hive, or do bees born later in the summer move further away from the hive?
These are interesting questions. Look at your data and graphs and see if you can answer them.

Knowing the Truth

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