Honeybees understand basic math | Popular Science
The brain of a bee (Apis mellifera) weighs less than a milligram and contains fewer than a million neurons, but this can be more than enough for surprisingly complex calculations. For decades, cognitive scientists and biologists have debated how everything that seemingly simple insects can understand. The answer may seem inconsequential, but it has major implications for how intelligence works and evolves across species. Now, a team from Monash University in Australia says they have a definitive answer about how intelligent bees are: Earth’s vital pollinators can count pretty well.
Previous work has indicated that bees understand addition, subtraction and even the concept of zero. While skeptics refuted the theory that insects responded solely to visual cues, some biologists, including Scarlett Howard, remained confident in their assessment.
“It can be difficult to put yourself in the mind of a bee to imagine how it sees the world, but trying to see the world through an animal’s eyes is an essential part of our work,” Howard said in a statement. “Bees always surprise us with the way they move through the world, interpret our questions and make decisions. »
To study the bee’s environmental understanding, Howard’s team looked at stimulus lineups—in this case, increasing the varieties and quantities of black shapes on a surface—but with an added twist. They also included a blank surface to represent “zero” in their experiments. Using reward-based incentives, they then analyzed the extent to which the bees learned to understand and associate the frequency of numbers with shapes and numbers based on their visual abilities.
According to the team’s study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciencesthey eliminated the theory that bees’ choices are only influenced by low-level perceptual cues.
“This finding strongly suggests that bees were engaging in abstract numerical reasoning rather than relying solely on spatial frequency, which a purely associative mechanism based on frequency cannot explain,” the study authors wrote.
Mirko Zanon, neuroscientist and collaborator from the University of Trento, added: “Our results show that [previous] the criticism does not hold when we consider the biology of the animal.
Outside of the laboratory, these cognitive skills can translate into a bee’s ability to count flower petals to determine and remember which plants are most nutritious. The findings could also help improve artificial intelligence modeling, showing that in some cases, “less is more” when it comes to computing needs. Regardless, the team’s findings underscore the importance of appreciating nature’s broad and often surprising range of knowledge.
“We see and experience the world very differently than animals, so we must be careful to center human perspectives and senses when we study animal intelligence,” Howard said.
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