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For many people, they’re something of a nuisance – and if you’ve ever returned home from vacation to learn your home has become the proud owner of a swarming hive, who could blame you.
While the risk of getting stung is real, bees are beloved by many more, for the delicious honey they make and their absolutely crucial role as one of the world’s best pollinators.
But did you know that bees are also super smart?
Studies have proven that bees can solve puzzles and recognise individual human faces; they can use simple tools and they can count too – and a recent study from Queen Mary University, London, has allowed bees to demonstrate their intelligence even further.
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In the study, which was recently published in the journal Biology Letters, the humble bumblebee was actually trained through positive reinforcement tactics to recognise morse code.
With a purpose-built maze to hand, the researchers taught the bumblebees to respond to dots and dashes, simulated through flashing light, with a dot represented by a quick flash and a dash represented by a longer one.
Following the maze via the dot flash, the bees would be rewarded with a sugary treat, whereas the snack associated with the dash flash was bitter and unpleasant to the bees.
To truly test the bees’ understanding of the two different flash patterns, the researchers ensured that the patterns switched, so that bees weren’t simply heading in the direction they knew spatially that the sweet treat would be. And lo and behold, they continued to follow the dot flash to their reward.
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This is groundbreaking for many reasons, but specifically because morse code and flashing lights are unfamiliar to bumblebees, and this training shows just how quickly these incredible little creatures can learn.
Researcher Alex Davidson noted in a statement:
“We wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn to the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it Since bees don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it’s remarkable that they could succeed at this task. The fact that they could track the duration of visual stimuli might suggest an extension of a time processing capacity that has evolved for different purposes, such as keeping track of movement in space or communication.”
While the researchers don’t know exactly how the bumblebees process the light stimulus in their brains to decipher between the two flashes and their association with the reward, one thing is quite clear.
Bumblebees are much smarter than we give them credit for.
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