Word: hive
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...prey by gluing nest material on its back to serve as camouflage. But, says Beck, the bug's behavior is probably "innate or genetically prewired." Another scientific index is the ability of animals to transmit information through so-called language behavior. Bees, foraging for pollen, return to the hive and perform an intricate figure-eight dance to map the route for other bees. Biologist James Gould of Princeton University says, however, that the dance is in the bees' genes, not their minds...
Nevertheless, there are examples of behavior suggesting that animals can process information and make judgments. Gould points out that honey bees, fed sugar water that is gradually moved away from the hive, anticipate where the food will be placed. Seagulls break open shellfish by dropping them on hard surfaces, flying low when their target is small. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, chimpanzees have been conditioned to communicate through symbols and are able to distinguish between signs that mean food and those that refer to nonedible items. Says Duane Rumbaugh: "Apes have the capacity to use symbols...
...edge of scenic recognition, tricking the viewer into the thought that just one more clue might disclose a particular room or restaurant, a familiar scene. Sometimes it will. The most spectacular painting in the current show, In the Bay of Naples, 1980-82, presents itself as a soft hive of colored blobs, blooming and twinkling in rows, against a dark ground. Lit windows? Strings of restaurant lights? A view from a terrace? Then more specific things appear: a pinkish vertical, another stage flat, turns into a stucco wall; a cobalt patch at the center, where the vanishing point would...
...that afternoon, Israeli jets roar high above the city. Two sonic booms follow in quick succession. A cloud of leaflets is produced in midair. It hangs, then floats down very slowly, like a great hive of small white birds beating their wings wildly as they fall...
...This atavism, like a hand grenade cushioned in the more civilized surrounding cortex, is the dark hive where many of mankind's primitive impulses originate. To go partners with that throwback, Americans have carried out of their own history another curiosity that evolution forgot to discard as the country changed from a sparsely populated, underpoliced agrarian society to a modern industrial civilization. That vestige is the gun-most notoriously the handgun, an anachronistic tool still much...