There has been a lot of excitement in recent years about the cognition of bee friends. A new study now suggests that they can count too.
The most common theory was that the bees They do not demonstrate an aptitude for numbers, but they do have the ability to differentiate between visual cues.
However, a study in the week in Biological Sciences might counter this by suggesting that, after all, bees are able to count.
“When we analyze stimuli in a way that reflects how bees actually see the world, what remains is a real sensitivity to number,” said the research leader and neuroscientist at the University of Trento (Italy), Mirko Zanonhas .
Previous experiments that sought to evaluate the numerical capabilities of bees (Apis mellifera) involved showing bees cards with patterns on them.
As the same magazine recalls, a notable experiment from 2019 involved associating invented symbols with numerical values that bees were trained to recognize. They were then shown a card with a number of shapes and given the task of selecting the symbol that represented that number.
During the training phase, the bees achieved an accuracy of about 75–80%.
In the tests themselves, performance was lower, reaching around 60 to 65%, but this value is still higher than what can be attributed to chance, leading the researchers to the conclusion that the bees were capable of recognizing numerical quantities.
However, according to a 2020 critique of the study, the bees may simply have been matching patterns rather than counting, and their vision may not have been sharp enough to resolve the images presented to them.
This criticism was fair – the investigators agreed. So they reexamined the data again.
The researchers reanalyzed visual patterns used in previous experiments to reflect how bees actually perceive them, rather than how humans do.
They used a mathematical model based on previous estimates of honey bee spatial acuity and evaluated the stimuli again. And… this is where they found something interesting.
The results suggest that the insects are responding to the number of waysnot just the general appearance of what they are observing. This supports the conclusion that bees are indeed sensitive to numbers, rather than relying solely on visual cues.
“It can be challenging to put ourselves in the mind of a bee to imagine how they see the world, but trying to see the world through the eyes of an animal is an essential part of our work,” the study’s corresponding author, Scarlett Howard, from Monash University (Australia), told Science Alert.
