Bees show surprising learning ability

In February 2017, researchers from Queen Mary University in London discovered that bees have a remarkable ability to learn complex tasks. Their findings, published in Science, revealed that bees can move a ball toward a target to receive sugar, a behavior not seen in their natural habits.

Learning beyond natural instincts

Until this study, such learning was thought to be limited to vertebrates with more developed brains. However, bees demonstrated an intelligence that goes beyond simple imitation, as they could observe a fellow bee, copy its actions, and even find more efficient ways to complete the task.

Challenging the bees with a novel task

For the experiment, researchers placed a bee in a small circular arena with a target at the center. The bee could obtain sugar by moving a large yellow ball to the target, but the ball was nearly half the size of the insect and located on the edge of the arena. This was an unusual challenge for the bees, who typically do not encounter such obstacles in nature.

Observation leads to success

When bees could watch a trained fellow bee perform the task, they almost always imitated the action, doing so much more quickly than when left to figure it out alone. Even when the demonstration involved a hidden magnet moving the ball, about 80% of the bees eventually succeeded in the task.