A honeybee’s brain is smaller than a grain of rice and holds fewer than a million nerve cells. Yours holds about 86 billion. And yet researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have shown, over and over, that bees can do something most animals can’t: simple math.
In one experiment, scientists trained bees to fly into a Y-shaped maze. At the entrance they saw a pattern with a few blue or yellow shapes. Blue meant “go to the side that shows one more shape.” Yellow meant “go to the side that shows one less.” After a bit of training, the bees got the answer right far more often than chance, even on shapes they had never seen before. They were really adding and subtracting, not just memorizing.
The same team also taught bees that an empty card was “less than” a card with one shape - meaning bees grasp the idea of zero, the same idea that took human mathematicians thousands of years to invent. So the next time a bee bumbles past you on a warm day, remember: that tiny buzzing dot is doing arithmetic in its head.
