Australian researchers have found bees are quite adept at remembering their surroundings, despite their apparent lack of brain power.
Scientists at Monash University have found bees possess remarkable cognitive powers. Photo: A shot of a Blue Banded Bee busy at work. Credit: aussiegall/Flickr
Scientists at Monash University in Melbourne have reported that a great deal of bee behaviour is not based on instinct, but learnt and remembered.
Dr Adrian Dyer, lead researcher and author of the report on bee memory in the science magazine Journal of Experimental Biology, told the ABC his team's research "...gives us a real insight into how neurones work and how neurones can interact and learn how to solve tasks."
Dr Dyer explained how he managed to "train" the bees to recognise images during their daily outings foraging for food.
"We devised an experiment which tackles a problem bees have to solve in their normal daily life. Bees have to fly in fairly complex environments like forests and use a variety of visual information to find flowers and return to their hives," he says.
"The question was to see if they could do the very fine discrimination tasks and we were reasonably surprised they were very, very good at it."
The training experiments involved bees recognising a photo of a tree by being given a reward (nectar) when they flew to it. At a second image of another tree, the bees were discouraged by being fed a bitter-tasting quinine mixture.
Researchers found the bees remembered which was the preferable tree even after the images were switched around.
"Bees which had been conditioned to the stimuli became very good at recognising it, which is quite exciting," said Dr Dyer.
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