Bumblebees Can Solve Problems on the Fly, Adding to the Insects’ List of Impressive Cognitive Abilities
In a series of experiments, the fuzzy pollinators figured out how to use a ball as a tool to access a sugary treat. The study further highlights that the critters are quite clever despite their tiny brains
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Some bumblebees can spontaneously solve problems, a discovery that further underscores the colorful creatures’ sophisticated cognitive abilities.
In a study published June 4 in the journal Science, researchers report that the black-and-yellow-striped insects figured out how to use tools to access a sugary reward without any training. Since bumblebees have relatively primitive brains, the findings challenge the idea that only large-brained creatures have advanced cognitive abilities.
“Spontaneous problem-solving is something that has never been shown in any invertebrate before,” study co-author Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu in Finland, tells Science News’ Erin Garcia de Jesús.
In recent years, researchers have been shedding new light on the intelligence of bees, which have sesame seed-sized brains. Past studies have suggested that the productive pollinators have a sense of rhythm, can create mental images, can do simple math and understand the concept of zero, among other cognitive feats.
For the new study, the scientists wanted to explore whether bumblebees could come up with creative solutions on the spot, which is considered “one of the highest peaks of cognitive performance,” writes Sacha Vignieri in the editor’s summary of the paper.
Loukola and his colleagues devised a series of experiments in which buff-tailed bumblebees had to use a Styrofoam ball to access a sugary treat. In one, they placed each bee individually into a small plexiglass chamber with multiple pits in the floor, one of which was beneath an artificial flower—a blue ring with a sugary center—on the ceiling. If a bee rolled the ball into the correct pit, it could clamber atop the object to reach the flower. The ball was key to accessing the treat: The chamber was too small for flight and too tall for bees to touch the ceiling, so the insects could not reach the flower by hovering under it, nor by standing below it.
The researchers taught the bees to associate the flower with food. They also taught the bees that the balls were movable. But, otherwise, they gave them no specific training on how to use the ball to access the treat.
The bumblebees in the study—all female worker bees that were just a few weeks old—were “truly naive,” Loukola tells CNN’s Jacopo Prisco. “We can be sure that none of the bumblebees have any earlier experience about these tasks, so we know that this is not innate behavior.”
Nearly 75 percent of bees taught about the flower and ball solved the puzzle.
“I was super excited when I saw [the behavior] for the first time,” Loukola tells the London Times’ Rhys Blakely. “I thought, ‘Woah—the bee knew exactly what she was doing.’”
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story, the researchers say. Some of the individuals that technically failed the test figured out a way to cheat. They realized they didn’t have to roll the ball into place to access the sugary reward, but rather, they could “just hang off the ceiling and try to drink from the flower,” lead author Akshaye Bhambore, also a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu, tells Scientific American’s Adam Kovac.
Did you know? Box-and-banana problem
The bee study was based on experiments developed for chimpanzees by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler more than a century ago. He hung bananas out of reach, but provided the primates items such as sticks, boxes and poles. Eventually, they realized they could use the objects to reach the banana, thus demonstrating their spontaneous problem-solving abilities.
The researchers conducted a similar experiment in a plexiglass chamber with a wall that hid the bees’ view of the flower. To access the reward, the bees had to find the flower, move the ball through a small opening in the barrier, place it in a pit underneath the flower and climb atop it. This multi-step test was designed to assess whether the bees could spontaneously solve the problem without relying solely on visual information. About 73 percent of analyzed bees—16 out of 22—passed the test.
Bees “do all kinds of remarkable things,” says Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved with the study, to the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. He describes the new study as “the clearest demonstration yet” that bees know what’s at stake.
“There’s a general perception that intelligent behavior requires big brains because [humans] are big-brained and relatively intelligent among animals,” Chittka adds. “Bees are a model of how much intelligence you can squeeze into a small nervous system. … It’s a good reminder of there being a motivation to pay some respect to these other beings.”
Similarly, Loukola also hopes the findings will help rewrite the narrative around insect cognition. Bees probably don’t think the same way humans do, he says, but they’re probably more intelligent than many people give them credit for.
“Most people think insects are reflex-based machines,” he tells the Guardian. “That they can’t have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don’t even realize that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to conduct additional experiments that might reveal even more about bumblebees’ problem-solving abilities, such as whether the critters experience something akin to an “aha” moment. They want to use slow-motion cameras to record the bees, then review the footage for potential behavioral clues suggesting that the insects have spontaneously discovered the solution to the problem at hand.
The team also wants to explore if the bees “really understand the physical properties of the objects themselves,” Bhambore tells Scientific American. They hope future experiments might reveal whether the creatures “can understand that this object differs from others and that they need to use one object to perform the task versus other, nonfunctional ones.”
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