Bees can perform addition and subtraction
by SEAN BAILLY
Aurore Avarguès-Weber from the University of Toulouse and colleagues from Melbourne, Australia, under the direction of Adrian Dyer, have continued to explore the mathematical abilities of bees. They have now shown that bees are capable of addition
and subtraction.
Honey bees can add and subtract: numerical cognition with a miniature brain
Honey bees are widely regarded as insects with sophisticated cognitive abilities. They live in complex societies, communicate through symbolic dances and can master abstract concepts such as larger/smaller or left/right. Previous research had already demonstrated their ability to count small quantities. Recent studies now show that bees can also learn and apply simple arithmetic operations such as addition and subtraction.
Performing arithmetic requires both long-term memory, to store learned rules, and working memory, to manipulate numerical information. While such abilities have been observed in primates, birds and even spiders, the honey bee possesses only about one million neurons. Despite this limited neural architecture, bees appear capable of complex numerical processing.
In earlier experiments, bees were trained using reward-based conditioning to discriminate between different quantities displayed as black dots. Once they mastered comparisons such as “greater than” and “less than,” they were presented with stimuli including zero elements. Their choices indicated that they interpreted zero as a numerical value smaller than one and other positive integers.
In a subsequent experiment, bees were tested in Y-shaped mazes. At the entrance, a panel displayed between one and five elements in either blue or yellow. Blue signalled that one unit should be added; yellow indicated that one unit should be subtracted. Inside the maze, two alternative panels presented different quantities, only one corresponding to the correct result. Correct choices were rewarded with sucrose solution, while incorrect choices resulted in a bitter quinine solution. After approximately one hundred trials, bees achieved a success rate of around 80%, significantly above chance, even though the visual configurations were varied to prevent simple memorisation.
These findings suggest that basic arithmetic abilities may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously assumed. They also demonstrate that large brain size is not a prerequisite for advanced numerical cognition. The honey bee illustrates how efficient neural circuits can support sophisticated cognitive functions despite limited structural complexity.
In conclusion, honey bees serve not only as key ecological agents but also as valuable models for understanding compact and efficient neural computation, with potential implications for the design of artificial intelligence systems.
See also:
- The Intelligence of Bees
- Behaviour and Cognition: What a Mini Brain Can Teach Us
- The Individual Intelligence of the Bee
- The Geometric Mind of Bees
- The Inner Life of Insects
- Laterality