If you don't like your honey having been regurgitated, there are alternatives for getting honey...

Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones.

That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees".

And an individual bee has limited memory. They even forget which hive they are from after a while if they don't return to it.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

Bees have both a geospatial "mental map" (based on landmarks, the sun, etc) and a chemical fingerprint (they recognize their nestmates' smell). Concerning their geospatial memory, not only is it not poor, the main problem with it is that it's too stubborn. If you move a hive 20 meters away, the bees will fly back to the same empty location where their hive used to be and wait there. They don't adapt well to change because they have a long-term memory of "the hive was here".

If a beekeeper wants to move a hive, they have to trigger an "orientation flight" to get the bees to learn the new location (this typically involves locking them inside their hive for several days to disrupt their routine). During an orientation flight, the bees will learn the new hive location, and then they'll subbornly remember that location long-term, even if you move the hive again.

As for recognizing their nestmates, this is again based on smell. A bee being isolated for days or weeks will still be recognized by guard bees at the entrance and welcomed in. However, guards will sometimes let in bees that don't belong to that hive as well, if e.g. they're passive and laden with pollen and nectar; they haven't "forgotten" their scent, they're just "forgiving" of mistakes if there's a reward to be had (bees sometimes make navigation errors, esp. if all nest boxes are similar in shape/colour or due to wind, and enter the wrong hive)

I'll repeat: bees do NOT have a short memory. This is a myth. It's not true. The very example you gave is actually an example of bee memory being too rigid.

It's IMHO amazingly impressive how dense information can be stored within neural networks. Even a comparably tiny LLM can store more information than the human brain, despite the brain's theoretical storage being far higher due to its vast number of connections (ANNs are better at information density, we're better at learning from limited datasets). The tiny LLM will crush humans at a quiz in virtually anything except said human's particular areas of expertise. Storing information as a superposition of states across a large number of neurons and connections (whether we're talking artificial or biological) is an immensely space-efficient way to do so, and the human mind is nowhere near the limits of information storage capability.

There is no technical reason why a given organism, such as a bee, could not achieve far denser information representations in order to be able to do more with its limited neural capacity (though there are always tradeoffs). One of the reasons that ANNs learn slower-but-denser is the use of a very low learning rate with a very large amount of data that covers the same topic from many different angles, giving the weights ample time to explore different possible circuits in parallel and seeing which ones predict reality the best ("learn everything all at once" vs. "learn this thing NOW"). Bees aren't tasked with learning anywhere nearly as diverse things as a human is and spend all day doing the same basic job (the same information "from different angles"), so it seems quite possible that their greater "information specialization" as they go about their day may be able to lead to denser representations of said information.

BTW, at risk of a tangent (your comment about non-neuron cells playing roles), it's been really interesting to me seeing how a key difference between artificial and biological learning has been clearing up. In biological neural networks, weight cannot flip sign (Dale's Principle). In the general case, a neuron is either excitatory or inhibitory (usually a small number of inhibitory neurons per cluster of excitatory neurons); it can't change from one to the other even if learning would favour that. At a first glance, that would seem to cripple learning capability (and definitely does if you implement that in ANNs). But what appears to actually happen in biological neural networks is a sort of horizontal learning, co-dependent synaptic plasticity, between excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Instead of merely weakening an excitatory connection down to zero and then being able to go no further, learning simultaneously weakens the excitatory connections and strengthens the inhibitory connections. The excitatory neurons are the primary drivers of information storage and processing, but the inhibitory neurons adjust the baseline to give them the flexibility to express negative net activations as needed.

It is a myth that individual bees only retain information for half an hour. Depending on the memory at hand, bee memories can last days, weeks, or even the remainder of their foraging life. They have to remember things, because the timeframes a hive operates on are much longer than half an hour, including night time and being kept inside by inclement weather for days or even weeks at at time. Individual bees also learn much more than can be conveyed through waggle dances, such as what colours and shapes of flowers are yielding best in a given area at what time of day (bee learning is essential to them being able to function as generalists, able to handle any mix of plants at any latitude).

Also, the hive doesn't just blindly accept whatever any bee says. Each bee functions as an individual in a society. When a bee waggles in the "town square" (on the comb), other bees gather around to "listen" (detecting oscillating shifts in the electric field plus tactile contact and sound). But whether a bee actually decides to make use of that information depends on whether they're having good or bad foraging success. Only a small fraction of bees on average (usually a single-digit percentage of watchers) will decide to make use of the information. And if another bee "disagrees" with a waggle dance - for example, if they've been there and found nothing, or worse, found dead bees, predators or a rival hive), they can make a counter-buzz to argue against it. The arguments can get quite "heated", with many bees taking part.

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own. There are simply various rallying factors that keep them together (for example, the scent of the queen, the desire to live in a warm hive, etc). The information communicated within a hive is limited; bees overwhelmingly rely on their own mind and memory, and perform their tasks as individuals.

I mean, bees attack small hive beetles by building prisons of propolis around them, that's something :)

Since Microsoft doesn't honor their license agreements, why should anyone else?

It's not THAT unlikely that if you have Porsche money, you can afford to get 3 phase service in your home.

Meanwhile, X.AI has asked the EPA for permission to release up to 100 million hyperfecund pesticide-resistant male mosquitoes in California and New York over two years to own the libs.

I get that there was probably a panicy passenger, but given 4.5 hours to land if they turn around or 4 hours to land if they continue to their destination and nothing but water under them either way, they may have actually prolonged the situation slightly by turning back.

This sounds like someone made minute, non-revolutionary advances on standard de-salination and described it as if they were the first person to invent evaporative desalination. People have been doing sun powered desalination for thousands of years.

At small scales.

At large scales, desalination plants use reverse osmosis, which pretty much inherently creates a brine that is released back into the environment. You're not "moving the salt" to any useful industrial process, since it's still rather dilute.

At best, some of those plants use solar power to drive the RO process. But we'd much rather have the electricity to power other things, so a process that uses a non-semiconducting metal surface to perform solar-powered evaporative distillation, without a need to dispose of a brine, and without relying upon solar-electric generation and conversion, is a bigger deal than you make it out to be.

They were half way there. It made no sense to turn around at that point.

Maybe he thought it was off.

Not only did they panic over a poorly chosen Bluetooth device name, they turned around AT or just past the halfway point, apparently to maximize the damage and inconvenience. They could just as well have continued as normal and sorted it out at the destination.

How about perform an exploratory laparotomy just in case you implanted a bomb?

I doubt it rises to that level. The device had a name that happened to be Bomb. Yelling FIRE is a specific communication of a dangerous condition.