Study finds bees can count to four

by Rich Bowden - Oct 28 2008, 21:49

Research by Australian scientists has used a number of experiments involving sugar and water to prove the honey bee is capable of counting up to four.

Img: Honey bee on lavender flower. Credit: barnoid/flickr

Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, of the University of Queensland's (UQ) Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), led the research which found the bees learned how to "count" a number of significant landmarks on their way to a food source. The findings may provide a new breakthrough in the understanding of the insect's cognitive capabilities say the team."We began by asking whether bees can learn to ‘count' the number of landmarks that they encounter on the way to a food source," Professor Srinivasan said. "Individually marked bees were trained to receive a reward of sugar solution after they had flown past a specific number of regularly spaced yellow stripes during their flight through a narrow tunnel.""Depending upon the experiment, this number was one, two, three or four.""After training, the bees were individually tested by removing the food reward, and observing their searching behaviour in the tunnel to determine which landmark they had associated most strongly with the reward during the training," said Prof Srinivasan.The study found that bees had the ability to count objects even when confronted with introduced random objects outside the bees' range of experience. "Bees trained in this way are able to count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered," Professor Srinivasan said. "Our findings provide evidence that bees are capable of counting objects on the way to a food source.""In all probability, this counting is performed sequentially, and required the ability to maintain a running tally of the number of events, incrementing the tally by one each time an event occurs."Professor Srinivasan's research paper "Evidence for Counting Bees" appears in the journal Animal Cognition.

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Study finds bees can count to four

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