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Last Updated on December 14, 2023 by Anthony
What are your thoughts on bumblebee intelligence? It is a safe bet that most of us don’t give a second thought to how smart any insects might be, let alone bees. But researchers are not like most of us. They are incessantly curious. They are curious enough to put together a study that has actually revealed how bumblebees solve problems. The study suggest they might be smarter than we think.
Queen Mary University of London researchers conducted their study by training a group of bumblebees to go after a sugar reward by opening a box. To get the box open, they had to solve the puzzle of how to get the lid off. Success was achieved by rotating the lid.
It is pretty amazing that they were able to train the initial group of bees to do that. But what was more amazing was observing how other bees learned to perform the task without any such training. How did they do it? By observing.
Push Here or There
Bumblebees obviously don’t have hands. They also do not have the strength to rotate a lid on a box. So researchers rigged their puzzle box with two buttons. One button rotated the lid clockwise while the other rotated it counterclockwise. All the bees had to do to get to the sugar solution was push one of the buttons. That they could do.
To get the most accurate results possible, the researchers did a few key things. First, they trained one group of bees to open the box by rotating the lid clockwise. Next, they trained another group to open it by pushing the counterclockwise button. Third, they divided the untrained bumblebees into test and control groups.
The test group was divided in half. One half observed the actions of the clockwise group; the other observed the actions of the counterclockwise group. The control group did not observe either behavior. After running their tests, this is what the researchers learned:
- Bees in the two test groups mimicked the behavior they had observed 98% of the time
- They continued to mimic the observed behavior even when taught the opposite behavior
- Bees in the test groups achieved success more often than the control group.
Control group bees were capable of figuring out the puzzle themselves to some degree. But the greatest level of success was measured in those bees that were able to observe other bees getting the box open.
Contrary to Previous Observations
What makes this study so amazing to us is that its results are contrary to previous observations. As the researchers themselves noted, what they observed during their tests lends itself well to the idea of “culture-like behavior” among bumblebees. It is behavior similar to what primates exhibit in the wild. The thing about bumblebees is that such behaviors have not been previously observed in wild populations.
We have long believed that bumblebees, honeybees, and other bee and wasp species work semi-independently but in a collective scenario. Each insect is responsible for its own learning and job performance. There doesn’t seem to be much cooperative effort in terms of social structure, learning, and passing skills on to successive generations.
Apparently, those previous assumptions are not entirely accurate. Maybe bumblebees do not have the same type of social structure as chimpanzees and gorillas. But it is clear from the research that they do learn from one another. Even if that learning is merely through the powers of observation, it is learning, nonetheless.
Learning Is a Natural Behavior
Perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised by the study’s findings. If you stop and think about it, you soon realize that learning is a natural behavior across nearly all species. Sure, sometimes learning amounts to little more than mimicking what others do. But observing and mimicking is as much learning as any other form of obtaining knowledge and applying it.
- Carter, Anthony (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 194 Pages - 02/28/2024 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Next time you see a group of bumblebees hanging around together outside the hive, don’t make any assumptions about what they are doing. It could be that one or two bees are doing some work and the others are watching and learning. They are apparently smart enough to do that. Kudos to them.
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