First insects found to have the complex capability

Bees may be far more clever than you imagine: they can grasp the concept of zero, according to a study published on Thursday in the international journal Science. They are the first insects to join the short list of animals — parrots, dolphins, primates and man — that can comprehend this advanced concept.

A team of scientists in Australia and France made the discovery by luring bees to a wall containing white squares, each with a different number (from two to five) of black shapes.

Using simple conditioning experiments such as rewarding the “less than” group with food for flying towards the display with fewer items, they ‘trained’ the bees on “greater than” and “lesser than” concepts.

Number training

They then introduced two numbers the bees hadn’t yet seen in their training: one and zero. The bees were consistently able to distinguish zero as lower than one. The bees were more accurate when zero was presented with a more distant number choice: a trait also seen in humans.

“Zero is a difficult concept to understand and a mathematical skill that doesn’t come easily — it takes children a few years to learn,” the study’s co-author Adrian Dyer, associate professor at Melbourne’s RMIT University, said in a press release.

The study raises the question of how a species that differs so much from humans — with fewer than one million neurons in its brain, compared to a human’s 86,000 million neurons — can share such a complex skill. Even several ancient human civilisations lacked the understanding of zero, a concept that is thought to have originated in India around the 5th century.

New tricks

“If bees can perceive zero with a brain of less than a million neurons, it suggests there are simple efficient ways to teach artificial intelligence new tricks,” said Mr. Dyer.

The experiments and analyses seem quite robust and the findings add to several impressive capabilities of bees such as time memory [associating the time of the day with food resources available outside their hives] and communication of navigational information through dance behaviour, Axel Brockmann, who studies bee behaviour at Bengaluru’s National Centre for Biological Sciences, said in an email to The Hindu.

However, the question still remains as to why bees have the capability of numerical ordering, he added.

“India is among the countries with the highest diversity of honey bee species. It is time to appreciate them in daily life and increase research on their behaviour and ecology,” he wrote.