Malc was referring to this news story, about an experiment where young Mongooses (Mongeese?) appeared to learn from their elders the technique for getting into fiddly food items.

Chris -  It’s a good point.  These animals obviously know how to pick things up and they know how to manipulate them in their paws, so that’s instinctive.  But how they actually choose to break into the object is obviously something they pick up from an adult.  The researchers did control for that instance that you've raised because by giving the escort animal the open egg, the young pups didn’t have to watch an adult breaking into it.  So therefore, when they came to open one themselves, they either chose to smash it on something or to gnaw into it.  And they showed equal numbers of them doing either, showing there was no bias.  So they do it by instinct, but they choose to do one thing or the other based on what they're shown how to do in certain situations by an adult or an older animal.

We posed this question to Elva Robinson from the University of York...

Elva -   In some species of ants, there are workers that are completely sterile although in many species of ants, bees and termites, the workers can actually reproduce a bit, but not as much as the queen.  This posed a problem for Darwin when he was thinking about evolution by natural selection because usually, evolution should move individuals towards the best chance of passing on their own genes directly to the next generation.  Obviously, sterile worker ants can't do that.  But they are, of course, very closely related to the queen who is their mother, and actually, because of ant genetics, they're more closely related genetically to their mother than we are to our own mothers, because ant genetics work slightly differently.  So, this means that their genes will be passed on to the next generation through their siblings, through their sisters, the future queens of other colonies, and through the males that that colony produces.

Chris -   So it’s less "selfish gene", it’s more that the genes will go on, but you have to be there to help the genes flow from somebody else.  But because you're closely related to them doesn’t matter?

Elva -   Yes and we call it kin selection; acting in the interests of the family when it’s very closely related.  There are also big efficiency benefits for these ant colonies because of the way they organise their division of labour.  So they can very efficiently help their siblings to reproduce.

We posed this question to James Nieh from the University of California at San Diego...

James -  There was an original study in India that created these questions and interest, and what they did is they actually put a radio cell phone transmitter inside the hive, but it really wasn’t done with very many colonies and the results were ambiguous.  They were not statistically significant. I actually have looked at this paper. In addition, the authors have said that their results were too broadly interpreted.  So I would say, the answer is that there really is no scientific evidence that cell phone towers or other types of electromagnetic radiation from communications devices harm bees.  In addition, there are many areas that are afflicted by colony collapse disorder that do not have cell phone towers that are nearby.  So it’s not thought to be a good link.

We posed this question, with reference to bees, to James Nieh from the University of California at San Diego and, with reference to ants, to Elva Robinson from the University of York...

James - Bees do vary in their acceptance of bees by their colonies.  In general though the guard bees smell bees that are coming in and if they detect a difference from their colony odour that’s significant, they will reject that bee or even try to kill it.  So, very often, these bees will be rejected.  However, the way that many beekeepers work is they take one colony and they divide it over subsequent years.  So in fact, there is a kind of relatedness among these different colonies, and if they are sister colonies, there is a good chance that a lost worker bee will be accepted.

Elva - It does vary depending on how closely [the ant colonies] are related and most ants are very hostile to ants coming in from other colonies.  So usually, they would fight and kill that ant.  But there are some species of ants which form networks of connected colonies where the colonies bud off and produce new colonies which pretty much stay in contact, so they're colonies made up of lots of different connected nests.  So then, an ant that got lost could go into any nest and it would be fine.

We posed this question to James Nieh from the University of California at San Diego...

James -  It’s definitely a part of colony collapse, which we think of as having four features.  One are parasites like Varroa destructor, the mite. Pesticides are thought to be involved, viral and bacterial diseases, and then finally, management practices which are not optimal.  We’re actually moving bees around a lot.  It’s startling that in one month, about 80% of all bee colonies in North America converged in Central California for agricultural pollination, and this can be very stressful because they're packing bees together and they're moving them around, and worker bees don't orient very well to a new location.  They tend to get lost.