Scientists Prove Honeybees Can Count . . .

I was a hobbyist beekeeper for several years in Vermont and Oregon ~ managing at the most about a dozen hives ~ so very little I hear about the intelligence of bees amazes me. One of the reasons I kept them was to study their astounding little brains, about the size of a grain of sand.

Now scientists in China and Australia have proved conclusively something any bee watcher already surmised:

Bees can count.

Scientists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and the Australian National University in Canberra launched the recent study by first integrating two species of bees ~ the European Apis mellifera, and Asiatic honeybees, A. cerana ~ into interracial colonies. 

In case you’re unaware, bees normally kill bees from other species, so this in itself is significant.

They then determined that the different bees have dialects specific to their own species. Their familiar “dances” to communicate information had different wiggles and durations. Eventually, the Asian honeybees were able to decode the dance of their European sisters.

Scientists then trained the European honeybees to find food by flying down a tunnel marked with colored stripes. They placed the food by the fourth stripe and the bees regularly returned to that stripe to get their reward. 

When the food was removed, the bees still stopped at the fourth stripe.

Then the scientists varied the spacing of the stripes and even replaced some with unfamiliar markers. Still, the bees consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former site, demonstrating they could count up to four, regardless of spacing or color of the markers. To the bees, it was the numeric identity that mattered.

So once again we find that the creatures with whom we share Earth aren't so stupid after all. The big lesson here needs to be learned by you-know-who.

The honeybee studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition and written up on LiveScience.com.