The Green Brain project wants to create an artificial Apis mellifera brain and implement said brain into a robot, that will be able to fly and and behave just like a honey bee!
The reasons for this project are:
- The bee brain has way less neurons than the brain of rodents (but still in the order of 10^6 neurons!), so understanding how this “simple” brain works could be a nice step towards understanding more complex brains.
- The bee population has been declining and scientists are not exactly sure why. Understanding bee behaviour and the organ that produces them might help solve the problem
- improvement of unmanned aerial vehicle control