© USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring LabBombus affinis, the rusty patched bumblebee, is shown here.
Recently, researchers at Queen Mary University of London
trained a group of buff-tailed bumblebees (
Bombus terrestris) to get little balls into goals — in a soccer-like game — in exchange for sweet treats.
It's not the first time bees have flexed their mental muscle in the lab. In addition to learning games, bees can also
recognize human faces in photographs,
count to four, and
solve computer science's famous "traveling salesman" problem.
"All too often, people will assume that because a bee's brain is little, which it undoubtedly is — it's no larger than perhaps a pinhead — that it might, therefore, be simple or not complex," says Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the soccer study's co-authors. (He also co-authored the "traveling salesman" study.)
But he explains that while bees pack just a million neurons into their tiny brains, each one may be as complex in structure as a fully grown oak tree. What's more, bee neurons are extraordinarily networked:
"A single one of these nerve cells might make contact with perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 other cells in that same brain."
"So, it's a long way from being a simple brain, but perhaps it's simpler than obviously a human brain with its 85 billion neurons," he says. "And so, therefore, we're hoping that we can use bees as a shortcut to understand integrative brain function and multitasking."
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