An odd buzz: Can bees do basic maths?

What we have known, for quite a while, is that bees are among the cleverest creatures in the animal kingdom. They can learn to carry out complex tasks, navigate mazes, solve problems. They search, find and remember (that’s how they forage for nectar).

Research has shown that bees can recognise human faces with 90% accuracy. It turns out they may have a knack for numbers too. According to a paper published in 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, bees can distinguish between odd and even numbers.

Researchers from Australia’s Deakin University, Monash University and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and France’s Center for Integrative Biology in Toulouse, first trained bees to tell the difference using positive association. “To teach bees a parity task, we separated individuals into two groups. One was trained to associate even numbers with sugar water and odd numbers with a bitter-tasting liquid. The other group was trained to associate odd numbers with sugar water, and even numbers with quinine,” the paper’s key authors (Scarlett Howard, Adrian Dyer, Andrew Greentree and Jair Garcia), wrote on the research portal The Conversation.

The study, which ran for five years, used laminated cards bearing printed numbers from 1 to 10. Through trial and error, the bees eventually learnt to choose the right answer about 80% of the time.

What fascinated the researchers was that when they introduced the numbers 11 and 12, which the bees hadn’t been tested on, they were able to distinguish the odd one from the even with 70% accuracy.

What the research couldn’t determine was how they are able to do it. Humans, for instance, tell odd numbers from even using memory or maths. But the human brain has 86 billion neurons; the bee brain has less than a million. Could that suffice? Could the understanding of numerical patterns be inherent, even in creatures with brains this small?

As the research project continues, the scientists are attempting to answer some of these questions. “To see their learning abilities first-hand was quite incredible,” Howard of Monash University told Wknd. “Each experiment we conduct now will have many different implications for understanding the bee brain and the limits of miniature insect brains, while also communicating to the public how amazing insects are.”