Bees learn football from their buddies

The insects show sophisticated learning for non-bee related tasks, and can even improve on what they are taught.

One bee demonstrates to another how to use a ball to gain access to a reward.

Social learning

To push the bees’ abilities, the researchers presented each instructor bee with three balls. Two had been glued in place and only one — the farthest from the goal — rolled freely. The instructors lugged that one to the goal. Test bees watched these sessions and were then presented with three freely rolling balls. Instead of copying the instructors by moving the farthest ball, test bees took the easy way out: they moved the closest one.

That impresses neuroethologist Ken Cheng of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “It sure looks like what would be called goal emulation,” or actions in pursuit of a goal rather than rote imitation, he says. If so, “that’s fairly sophisticated”.

Study co-author Clint Perry, a cognitive neuroethologist at Queen Mary, points out that bees tutored by a fellow insect outperformed bees without role models: one group watched as the ball was moved by a magnet, and another group was given no demonstration at all. “Social information helped tremendously,” he says.

“It really pushes the idea that small brains aren’t necessarily simpler,” Perry says. “These miniature brains can accomplish a lot more than we thought.”

Journal name: Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21540