Scientists in Australia stying honeybees uncovered how the small insects can actually learn how to add and subtract, according to new research published this week in the journal Science Advances.
The Guardian said researchers previously found bees can understand the concept of zero and learn how to indicate which object out of two is smaller.
But Dr. Adrian Dyer, co-author of the research from RMIT University in Australia, said bees can even learn how to carry out exact numerical calculations, including adding or subtracting a given number.
“Their brain can manage a long-term rule and applying that to a mathematical problem to come up with a correct answer,” said Dr. Dyer. “That is a different type of number processing to spontaneous quantity judgments.”
Scientists once thought humans were the only ones who could manage those calculations, but new research has found a growing number of creatures can actually add or subtract.
“[There was] evidence that other primates could do it and then an African grey parrot, Alex, famously could do it, but also some spiders could do it,” said Dr. Dyer.
The research also contributes to the evidence that language is not necessary for learning how to manipulate numbers.
“It is teaching us a lot about what brains can do and what necessary structures you might need in brains to achieve certain outcomes,” said the report.
The article describes how Dr. Dyer and their research team released bees into a simple maze where they were shown a picture of colored shapes.
After the bees fly through a hole, they were presented with two more images showing a different number of shapes.
Images that were shown with a blue hint, the insects would fly for the one image shown with more shapes, but when the shapes were yellow, the bees were rewarded for flying to the image with fewer shapes.
Scientists gave the bees a quinine solution if they flew to the "incorrect" image to help train them.
“It is very hard to train a bee to understand a plus or minus sign because that is an abstract symbol, so we use color because they learn color very quickly,” said Dyer.
The researchers used fourteen bees throughout the experiment, who each completed 100 of the training exercises using shapes and numbers chosen at random.
The results displayed how the bees were doing better on the tests than pure chance since they were getting the correct answer between 64% and 72% of the time
“It is not that every bee could do this [spontaneously], but we could teach them to do it,” said Dr. Dyer, who admitted how difficult it was to actually test if animals have numerical competence.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody