The study sheds light on the evolution of quantitative abilities in other species, decoupling numerical understanding from human language
The oval-shaped brain of a honeybee is roughly the size of a single sesame seed. It contains fewer than 1 million neurons, while the human brain contains 100 billion.
But bees can do something more, according to a paper published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed Science Advances journal. They can add and subtract, placing one of the world’s leading pollinators in the venerable company of monkeys, parrots and, yes, spiders — the cognitive A-list of the animal kingdom.
Evidence that a bee can learn to use a mathematical operator is very important for our understanding of how big brains, like ours, may have plausibly evolved the capacity for the incredible mathematical achievements In the new study, conducted last year at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in southeastern Australia, the researchers devised a Y-shaped maze to train 14 bees to add and subtract.
At first, the insects made random decisions. But across 100 trials each, the bees came to understand when they were supposed to choose the +1 or the -1 option.
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