Honey bees have proven themselves even smarter than previously thought, with new research from Monash University finding they order numbers from left to right like humans.
The tiny mathematicians have impressed researchers with their numerical and spatial processing skills, adding to a growing appreciation of the bee’s intelligence.
To test how they preferred to order numbers, researchers showed the bees small cards with varying quantities of shapes in different patterns.
Through various combinations and placements, the bees showed evidence of preferring smaller numbers to be placed to their left and larger ones to their right.
The study is the result of a collaboration between Monash University and Melbourne University, led by Dr Scarlett Howard, Monash University Research Fellow and head of the University’s Integrative Cognition, Ecology and Bio-inspiration Research Group.
Dr Howard said bees’ strong information processing skills make them ideal research subjects to study animals with miniature brains.
“Learning how different species process information like numbers and space gives us a greater overall context for our understanding of both human and animal brains. We can learn what is different and what is the same for how our minds work,” Dr Howard said.
“Previous studies have shown several other species, including apes and some birds, have preferences for ordering numbers in various directions.
“It shows us how information in brains is ordered efficiently, the origins for those biases, and how widespread information processing is across species.”
Co-researcher Adrian Dyer, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Monash Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, said the finding was another piece in the complex puzzle of evolution.
“The last time we had a common ancestor with bees was more than 600 million years ago, but they have either retained or separately developed this ability that is so like our own,” Associate Professor Dyer said.
“We tend to overlook the intelligence of animals with smaller brains, but it’s not always the case.
“Humans have almost 100 billion neurons in our brains, whereas bees have less than a million, yet we have these measurable similarities in neural processing.”
Jung-Chun (Zaza) Kuo was a major collaborator on the research while completing a jointly-supervised Honours degree at Melbourne University with Melbourne’s Professor Devi Stuart-Fox, Monash’s Associate Professor Dyer and others at Monash.
“This finding has significant implications for the evolution of cognitive functions, information processing, and mathematic ability in humans,” she said.
The evidence that honey bees, humans, some primates, and birds show directional preferences for ordering numbers suggests that this way of processing information has advantages for very different animals.
Researchers are now aiming to solve the mysteries of why such different animal species prefer to link space and number in similar ways, how a miniature brain enables mathematical processing, and the possible lessons for efficient design of new technology inspired by animal minds.
The full research paper in the the peer-reviewed scientific journal Animal Behaviour is available online at doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.123054
