Busy bee: The experiments demonstrate the remarkable learning power of social insects, which have to go out foraging over long distances.
Credit: iStockphoto
The experiments demonstrate the remarkable learning power of social insects, which have to go out foraging over long distances – the ANU team has tracked bees over distances as great as 11 km – and then find their back to the hive, and out to the food source again reliably.
Zhang said the ability to discriminate between different numbers is part of this navigation, perhaps as bees pass clumps of two trees or three trees on their way to the food source, or use similar patterns among flowers or other landmarks as they draw close to it.
“There has been a lot of evidence that vertebrates, such as pigeons, dolphins or monkeys, have some numerical competence – but we never expected to find such abilities in insects," he said. "Our feeling now is that, so far as these very basic skills go, there is probably no boundary between insects, animals and us.”
The tantalising question is whether bees can actually perform elementary arithmetic - and the researchers are already planning an experiment to explore it.
With the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
