Despite Their Tiny Brains, Bumblebees Have a Surprising Sense of Rhythm, According to a New Study by Neuroscientists

By speeding up the tempo of alternating flashing lights, the scientists were able to demonstrate yet another example of the small insect’s remarkable mind

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 3, 2026

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Picking up on rhythm was long thought to have been a skill exclusive to humans, birds and a few other mammals like chimpanzees. But in a surprising new study, scientists have found that bumblebees demonstrate a sense of rhythm—a first for such a small-brained insect.

“That’s an unexpected, beautiful finding,” says Henkjan Honing, a music cognition researcher at the University of Amsterdam, who was not involved in the work, to Christina Larson at Science.

Andrew Barron, a comparative neuroscientist at Macquarie University in Australia, and his team were curious to see whether an animal with a tiny brain, like the bumblebee, could recognize rhythm. They conducted a series of experiments to test this ability, and their findings were published in the journal Science on April 2.

In the first experiment, the researchers trained the bees to forage from artificial flowers with LED lights that flashed in two distinct patterns. One signaled a reward of sugar water, and the other signaled no reward. The bees learned to differentiate between the two signals, for example a repeating dash-dot-dash versus a repeating dot-dot-dash-dash. Even after the researchers removed the reward, nearly all of the bees still preferred the flower that flashed the signal that previously indicated sugar.

Bees learned to recognise flashing patterns indicating food

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Next, the scientists quickened the signals' tempo, and the bees could still differentiate between them. “This shows bees had learned a rhythm regardless of tempo—the first evidence that bees had learned a flexible rhythm,” Barron writes in The Conversation.

“Imagine you’re listening to a song, and it’s slowed down or sped up, but you can still recognize it,” explains Cwyn Solvi, a cognitive neuroethologist and study co-author at Southern Medical University, to Science. “That’s not because you’ve memorized one single detail, but because you’ve grasped the whole structure.”

Then, the researchers challenged the bees even further. They placed the bees in a maze with a vibrating floor at its junction. “If it was vibrating dot dash dot dash, it meant turn right to get sugar,” says Barron to James Woodford at New Scientist. “So, one rhythm indicated to turn left, one rhythm indicated turn right, and we trained them like that. We showed they could learn that.”

A bee recognises rhythm via pulsed light

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The researchers still don’t know how bees are able to do this with their small brains, but the findings point to a deeper evolutionary root to rhythm sensing. Perhaps the animals’ complex social structure shaped the behavior, Barron says to Science. “Rhythms are everywhere in a bee’s natural world,” Barron adds. “So much of interacting with the world is about pulling out repeating patterns.”

Previous studies of bumblebees have found that the insects’ sesame seed-sized brain can accomplish great feats. Scientists have found that bees can do basic math, understand what “zero” represents and even play soccer. A 2020 study recorded that bumblebees may create mental images of objects, and a 2022 journal article posited that bees like to play with toys.

Understanding how bees are able to do all this could have broader implications: it can help scientists develop technologies that allow miniature sensors detect rhythmic temporal structure, “from lightweight solutions to speech and music recognition to diagnosis of heart irregularities, or pre-epileptic brain waves,” Barron writes.

“That an organism like a bee, with a bee-type brain, is able to abstract a rhythm is remarkable,” Barron says to New Scientist.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.