Central Beekeepers Alliance

Researchers in Australia have discovered that honeybees can count. Bees may be a long way from being able to count their own numbers of sisters in the hive, but it has been shown that they can count up to four, at any rate.

“We began by asking whether bees can learn to ‘count’ the number of landmarks that they encounter on the way to a food source,“ said Professor Mandyam Srinivasan of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), who led the research conducted with a colleague from Sweden, Marie Dacke.

“Individually marked bees were trained to receive a reward of sugar solution after they had flown past a specific number of regularly spaced yellow stripes during their flight through a narrow tunnel.

“Depending upon the experiment, this number was one, two, three or four.

“After training, the bees were individually tested by removing the food reward, and observing their searching behaviour in the tunnel to determine which landmark they had associated most strongly with the reward during the training.”

When the research team random introduced random objects that were outside the bees’ range of experience, the bees’ ability to count to four did not appear to be hampered.

“Bees trained in this way are able to count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered,” Professor Srinivasan said.

“Our findings provide evidence that bees are capable of counting objects on the way to a food source.

“In all probability, this counting is performed sequentially, and required the ability to maintain a running tally of the number of events, incrementing the tally by one each time an event occurs.”

The research paper”Evidence for counting in insects” by Marie Dacke and Mandyam Srinivasan, was published in the journal Animal Cognition: Volume 11, Number 4: October, 2008.

Abstract:

Here we investigate the counting ability in honeybees by training them to receive a food reward after they have passed a specific number of landmarks. The distance to the food reward is varied frequently and randomly, whilst keeping the number of intervening landmarks constant. Thus, the bees cannot identify the food reward in terms of its distance from the hive.

We find that bees can count up to four objects, when they are encountered sequentially during flight. Furthermore, bees trained in this way are able count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered, thus demonstrating that they are capable of object-independent counting.

A further experiment reveals that the counting ability that the bees display in our experiments is primarily sequential in nature. It appears that bees can navigate to food sources by maintaining a running count of prominent landmarks that are passed en route, provided this number does not exceed four.