Specimen of bee of the species Bombus terrestris
In one of the most recent tests of the complexity of the bee brain, a team of scientists has managed to teach these furry insects to distinguish patterns of light – a simplified kind of Morse code – to find a sugary reward.
A new study has demonstrated for the first time that the species A terrestrial bomb of bees is able to make decisionss about where to forage for food solely based on the duration of a visual stimulus.
The results, recently published in the journal Biology Lettersreveal that bees can process temporary informationl, as with vertebrates – a capacity that, in nature, can be decisive for survival.
“We wanted to see if bees could learn the difference between these different durations and it was exciting to see that they did”, says the animal behavior specialist Alex Davidsonfrom Queen Mary University of London, cited hair.
In recent years, unexpected depths have been discovered in the ocean, which surprise the scientific community.
Not only do bees seem to practice a kind of agriculturebut also manage to cooperate and teach each other how to solve puzzles – something considered too advanced for such small brains.
Furthermore, some bee species have already demonstrated understanding and application.
The ability to recognize the duration of a stimulus is a skill that can be useful to animals in various situationsfrom searching for food and mating to escaping predators.
Davidson and his colleagues decided to test this ability in bees, designing an experiment to see if the insects could detect the difference between a brief and a long flash of light – the elementary units of the morse code.
To begin with, bees were placed in front of a screen where, in a small forage arena, two flashing lights appeared – one with a longer duration and the other with a shorter duration.
In one of the tests, 5-second light pulses were compared with 1-second flashes; in others, stimuli of 2.5 seconds were used for the long duration and 0.5 seconds for the short duration.
Each duration was associated with a sugary reward – something bees like – or quininea bitter substance called, which they detest. The researchers varied the reward signals, showing different combinations to different groups of bees.
In the first phase of the test, the insects had to learn which duration corresponded to sugar and which to quinine. They had to navigate the maze until they reached the criteria for 15 correct choices in 20 attempts.
Then it was time to test if they had actually learned the pattern temporal, completely removing the reward, to ensure that they were not just following the smell of sugar or other cues.
Even without access to sugar, bees chose the temporal pattern associated with the reward more often. than would be expected by mere chancewhich indicates that they could distinguish between short and long flashes of light.
How and why they achieve this featremains to be clarified. “Since bees do not encounter intermittent light stimuli in their natural environment, it’s extraordinary that they have been successful in this task”, says Davidson.
“The fact that they can monitor the duration of visual stimuli may indicate a extension of the ability to process timewhich will have evolved for other purposes, such as tracking movement in space or for communication purposes”, details the researcher.
“Alternatively, this surprising ability to encode and process the duration of time could be a fundamental component of the nervous systemintrinsic to the properties of neurons. Only further research can answer this question”, he concludes.
This study reminds us that complex cognitive processes can occur in a brain the size of a poppy seed and that abilities once considered exclusive to humans are, after all, more common in the animal kingdom than previously thought.
