Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of simply recognizing 3 is greater than 2. The study, published today in Biology Letters, is an “important contribution” and “part of a growing body of work” on bees’ mathematical cognition, according to Adrian Dyer, an insect vision scientist at RMIT University in Australia, who was not involved in the study.
We already knew honeybees can add, understand zero and recognize numerical symbols. These new findings suggest that bees can flexibly use both absolute and relative numerical reasoning, which is similar to the kind of reasoning that humans have.
