Brainy bees

 

Brainy bees

The 'Waggle Dance' is a communication behavior observed in honeybees, where a dancing bee moves in a straight line and then in a semicircle to convey information about the distance and direction of a food source to other colony members.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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Robin at TheCrankyCrow was wondering how people discovered that bees could count. It has long been known that honey bees return to their hive and ‘dance’ to tell the other bees where to go, and how far, to find nectar and pollen. 

Bees have minute brains, yet display behaviour usually associated with larger, more complex nervous systems. Experimenters in the 1990s trained honey bees to discriminate between pictures showing different numbers of shapes. They learned that choosing an image with the required number of shapes earned them a sweet reward. If they chose a picture with ‘fewer shapes’ they were given a bitter treat as a disincentive. 

Once they were indicating a high degree of accuracy, of about 80%, they were tested without rewards to discover if they really recognised number difference. When the shapes were changed, or rearranged, the bees continued to choose the correct images, thus showing that they were responding to number, not pattern.

Bees also showed that they noticed and counted landmarks in their flight path. If landmarks were removed or added, the bees adjusted their flight to find the food.

Further research demonstrated that bees can count to at least five, comparable to many vertebrates, though you’ll never hear them chanting their numbers. They can be taught simple arithmetic and understand that ‘zero’ is a quantity smaller than one.

In attempting to understand the mathematical brains of bees, I have succeeded in confusing myself somewhat.

A bumblebee choosing between two patterns containing different numbers of yellow circles.

 Credit Lars Chittka

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